Facial expression recognition based on two-stage features extraction

Facial expression recognition plays an important role in a variety of real-world applications such as human-computer interaction, robot control, smart meeting, and visual surveillance. One critical step for facial expression recognition is to accurately extract emotional features. In this article, a facial expression recognition approach based on two-stage local facial textures extraction is proposed. At the first stage, we use the threshold local binary pattern to transform a facial image into a feature image. We then extract the most discriminate features from the feature image by using the block-based center-symmetric local binary pattern. Finally, these features are classified by the support vector machine. Experimental results are provided to illustrate the proposed approach is an effective method, compared to other similar methods. (C) 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.