Facial Expression Recognition Using Stationary Wavelet Transform Features

Humans use facial expressions to convey personal feelings. Facial expressions need to be automatically recognized to design control and interactive applications. Feature extraction in an accurate manner is one of the key steps in automatic facial expression recognition system. Current frequency domain facial expression recognition systems have not fully utilized the facial elements and muscle movements for recognition. In this paper, stationary wavelet transform is used to extract features for facial expression recognition due to its good localization characteristics, in both spectral and spatial domains. More specifically a combination of horizontal and vertical subbands of stationary wavelet transform is used as these subbands contain muscle movement information for majority of the facial expressions. Feature dimensionality is further reduced by applying discrete cosine transform on these subbands. The selected features are then passed into feed forward neural network that is trained through back propagation algorithm. An average recognition rate of 98.83% and 96.61% is achieved for JAFFE and CK+ dataset, respectively. An accuracy of 94.28% is achieved for MS-Kinect dataset that is locally recorded. It has been observed that the proposed technique is very promising for facial expression recognition when compared to other state-of-the-art techniques.