Facial expression recognition based on hybrid approach

Abstract

This paper proposes an automatic system for facial expression recognition using a hybrid approach in the feature extraction phase (appearance and geometric). Appearance features are extracted as Local Directional Number (LDN) descriptors while facial landmark points and their displacements are considered as geometric features. Expression recognition is performed using multiple SVMs and decision level fusion. The proposed method was tested on the Extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) database and obtained an overall 96.36 % recognition rate which outperformed the other state-of-the-art methods for facial expression recognition.