A region based methodology for facial expression recognition

Facial expression recognition is an active research field which accommodates the need of interaction between humans and machines in a broad field of subjects. This work investigates the performance of a multi-scale and multi-orientation Gabor Filter Bank constructed in such a way to avoid redundant information. A region based approach is employed using different neighbourhood size at the locations of 34 fiducial points. Furthermore, a reduced set of 19 fiducial points is used to model the face geometry. The use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is evaluated. The proposed methodology is evaluated for the classification of the 6 basic emotions proposed by Ekman considering neutral expression as the seventh emotion.