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Loughborough University Spontaneous Expression Database and baseline results for automatic emotion recognition

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thesis
posted on 2015-11-18, 16:41 authored by Segun Aina
The study of facial expressions in humans dates back to the 19th century and the study of the emotions that these facial expressions portray dates back even further. It is a natural part of non-verbal communication for humans to pass across messages using facial expressions either consciously or subconsciously, it is also routine for other humans to recognize these facial expressions and understand or deduce the underlying emotions which they represent. Over two decades ago and following technological advances, particularly in the area of image processing, research began into the use of machines for the recognition of facial expressions from images with the aim of inferring the corresponding emotion. Given a previously unknown test sample, the supervised learning problem is to accurately determine the facial expression class to which the test sample belongs using the knowledge of the known class memberships of each image from a set of training images. The solution to this problem building an effective classifier to recognize the facial expression is hinged on the availability of representative training data. To date, much of the research in the area of Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is still based on posed (acted) facial expression databases, which are often exaggerated and therefore not representative of real life affective displays, as such there is a need for more publically accessible spontaneous databases that are well labelled. This thesis therefore reports on the development of the newly collected Loughborough University Spontaneous Expression Database (LUSED); designed to bolster the development of new recognition systems and to provide a benchmark for researchers to compare results with more natural expression classes than most existing databases. To collect the database, an experiment was set up where volunteers were discretely videotaped while they watched a selection of emotion inducing video clips. The utility of the new LUSED dataset is validated using both traditional and more recent pattern recognition techniques; (1) baseline results are presented using the combination of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis (FLDA) and their kernel variants Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA), Kernel Fisher Discriminant Analysis (KFDA) with a Nearest Neighbour-based classifier. These results are compared to the performance of an existing natural expression database Natural Visible and Infrared Expression (NVIE) database. A scheme for the recognition of encrypted facial expression images is also presented. (2) Benchmark results are presented by combining PCA, FLDA, KPCA and KFDA with a Sparse Representation-based Classifier (SRC). A maximum accuracy of 68% was obtained recognizing five expression classes, which is comparatively better than the known maximum for a natural database; around 70% (from recognizing only three classes) obtained from NVIE.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Publisher

© Segun Aina

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.

Language

  • en