Recognizing facial expression using particle filter based feature points tracker

Abstract

The paper focuses on an evaluation of particle filter based facial feature tracker. Particle filter is a successful tool in the non-linear and the non-Gaussian estimation problems. We developed a particle filter based facial points tracker with a simple observation model based on sum-of-squared differences (SSD) between the intensities. Multistate face component model is used to estimate the occluded feature points. The important distances are calculated from tracked points. Two kinds of classification schemes are considered, the hidden Markov model (HMM) as sequence based recognizer and support vector machine (SVM) as frame based recognizer. A comparative study is shown in the classification of five basic expressions, i.e., anger, sadness, happiness, surprise and disgust. The tests are conducted on Cohn-Kanade and MMI face expression databases. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.