Abstract
Automatic facial expression recognition (FER) from non-frontal views is a challenging research topic which has recently started to attract the attention of the research community. Pose variations are difficult to tackle and many face analysis methods require the use of sophisticated normalization and initialization procedures. Thus head-pose invariant facial expression recognition continues to be an issue to traditional methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for pose-invariant FER based on pose-robust features which are learned by deep learning methods — principal component analysis network (PCANet) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) (PRP-CNN). In the first stage, unlabeled frontal face images are used to learn features by PCANet. The features, in the second stage, are used as the target of CNN to learn a feature mapping between frontal faces and non-frontal faces. We then describe the non-frontal face images using the novel descriptions generated by the maps, and get unified descriptors for arbitrary face images. Finally, the pose-robust features are used to train a single classifier for FER instead of training multiple models for each specific pose. Our method, on the whole, does not require pose/ landmark annotation and can recognize facial expression in a wide range of orientations. Extensive experiments on two public databases show that our framework yields dramatic improvements in facial expression analysis.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Zheng W M. Multi-view facial expression recognition based on group sparse reduced-rank regression. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2014, 5(1): 71–85
Eleftheriadis S, Rudovic O, Pantic M. Discriminative shared gaussian processes for multiview and view-invariant facial expression recognition. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2015, 24(1): 189–204
Liu P, Han S Z, Meng Z B, Tong Y. Facial expression recognition via a boosted deep belief network. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2014, 1805–1812
Zeng Z, Pantic M, Roisman G I, Huang T S. A survey of affect recognition methods: audio, visual, and spontaneous expressions. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis andMachine Intelligence, 2009, 31(1): 39–58
Moore S, Bowden R. Local binary patterns for multi-view facial expression recognition. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 2011, 115(4): 541–558
Hesse N, Gehrig T, Gao H, Ekenel H K. Multi-view facial expression recognition using local appearance features. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Pattern Recognition. 2012, 3533–3536
Rudovic O, Pantic M, Patras I. Coupled Gaussian processes for poseinvariant facial expression recognition. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2013, 35(6): 1357–1369
Kumano S, Otsuka K, Yamato J, Maeda E, Sato Y. Pose-invariant facial expression recognition using variable-intensity templates. International Journal of Computer Vision, 2009, 83(2): 178–194
Biswas A, Ghose M K. Expression invariant face recognition using DWT sift features. International Journal of Computer Applications, 2014, 92(2): 30–32
Jian S, Hu C B, Aggarwal J K. Facial expression recognition with temporal modeling of shapes. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. 2011, 1642–1649
Girisha H, Sreepathi B, Karibasappa K. Multi-view face recognition using local binary pattern. International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies, 2014, 5(3): 2978–2981
Dahmane M, Meunier J. Emotion recognition using dynamic gridbased HoG features. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition andWorkshops. 2011, 884–888
Hu Y X, Zeng Z, Yin L J, Wei X Z, Tu J, Huang T S. A study of non-frontal-view facial expressions recognition. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Pattern Recognition. 2008, 1–4
Rudovic O, Patras I, Pantic M. Regression-based multiview facial expression recognition. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Pattern Recognition. 2010, 4121–4124
Hu Y X, Zeng Z H, Yin L J, Wei X Z, Zhou X, Huang T S. Multi-view facial expression recognition. In: Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition. 2008, 56–61
Gupta S K, Agrwal S, Meena Y K, Nain N. A hybrid method of feature extraction for facial expression recognition. In: Proceedings of Signal-Image Technology and Internet-Based Systems. 2011, 422–425
Ding C X, Tao D C. A comprehensive survey on pose-invariant face recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2015
Tong Y, Chen J X, Ji Q. A unified probabilistic framework for spontaneous facial action modeling and unerstanding. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2010, 32(2): 258–273
Zheng W M, Tang H, Lin Z C, Huang T S. Emotion recognition from arbitrary view facial images. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision. 2010, 490–503
Sung J, Kim D. Real-time facial expression recognition using STAAM and layered GDA classifier. Image and Vision Computing, 2009, 27(9): 1315–1325
Tang H, Hasegawa-Johnson M, Huang T. Non-frontal view facial expression recognition based on ergodic hidden markov model supervectors. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. 2010, 1202–1207
Ranzato M, Susskind J, Mnih V, Hinton G. On deep generative models with applications to recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2011, 2857–2864
Rifai S, Bengio Y, Courville A, Vincent P, Mirza M. Disentangling factors of variation for facial expression recognition. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision. 2012, 808–822
Eleftheriadis S, Rudovic O, Pantic M. Shared Gaussian process latent variable model for multi-view facial expression recognition. In: Proceedings of International Symposium on Visual Computing. 2013, 527–538
Liu M Y, Shan S G, Wang R P, Chen X L. Learning expressionlets on spatio-temporal manifold for dynamic facial expression recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2014, 1749–1756
Rifai S, Vincent P, Muller X, Glorot X, Bengio Y. Contracting autoencoders: explicit invariance during feature extraction. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning. 2011, 833–840
Saudagare P V, Chaudhari D S. Facial expression recognition using neural network — an overview. International Journal of Soft Computing and Engineering, 2012, 2(1): 224–227
Li J G, Zhang Y M. Learning surf cascade for fast and accurate object detection. In: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2013, 3468–3475
Viola P, Jones M. Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2001, 511–518
Yin L J, Wei X Z, Sun Y, Wang J, Rosato M J. A 3D facial expression database for facial behavior research. In: Proceedings of Automatic face and gesture recognition. 2006, 211–216
Dhall A, Goecke R, Lucey S, Gedeon T. Static facial expressions analysis in tough conditions: data, evaluation protocol and benchmark. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. 2011, 2106–2112
Zheng WM, Tang H, Lin Z C, Huang T S. A novel approach to expression recognition from non-frontal face images. In: Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. 2009, 1901–1908
Tariq U, Yang J, Huang T. Maximum margin gmm learning for facial expression recognition. In: Proceedings of Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition. 2013, 1–6
Tariq U, Yang J C, Huang T S. Supervised super-vector encoding for facial expression recognition. Pattern Recognition, 2014, 89–95
Jampour M, Mauthner T, Bischof H. Multi-view facial expressions recognition using local linear regression of sparse codes. In: Proceedings of the 20th Computer Vision Winter Workshop Paul Wohlhart, 2015
Tariq U, Yang J C, Huang T S. Multi-view facial expression recognition analysis with generic sparse coding feature. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision. 2012, 578–588
Kan M N, Shan S G, Zhang H H, Lao S H, Chen X L. Multi-view discriminant analysis. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision. 2012, 808–821
Sharma A, Kumar A, Daume H, Jacobs D W. Generalized multiview analysis: a discriminative latent space. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2012, 2160–2167
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Feifei Zhang received her BS degree in computer science and technology from Xuchang University, China in 2013. she is currently a MS candidate in computer technology with the School of Computer Science and Communication Engineering at Jiangsu University, China. Her research interests include affect computing and pattern recognition.
Yongbin Yu received his BS degree in computer science and technology from Jiangsu University, China in 2012. He received his MS degree of computer application technology in the School of Computer Science and Communication Engineering at Jiangsu University. His research interests include affect computing and pattern recognition.
Qirong Mao received her MS and PhD degrees from Jiangsu University, China in 2002 and 2009, both in computer application technology. She is currently an associate professor of the School of Computer Science and Communication Engineering, Jiangsu University. Her research interests include affective computing, pattern recognition, and multimedia analysis. She has published over 30 technical articles, some of them in premium journals and conferences such as ACMMultimedia, IEEE Transactions onMultimedia. She is a member of the IEEE.
Jianping Gou received the BS degree in computer science from Beifang University of Nationalities, China in 2005, the MS degree in computer science from the Southwest Jiaotong University, China in 2008, and the PhD degree in computer science from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China in 2012. He is currently a lecturer in School of Computer Science and Telecommunication Engineering, JiangSu University, China. His current research interests include pattern classification, machine learning.
Yongzhao Zhan received his BS degree from Fuzhou University, China in 1984 and his PhD degree from Nanjing University, China in 2000, both in computer science and technology. He is currently a professor and the dean of the School of Computer Science and Communication Engineering, Jiangsu University, China. His research interests include multimedia analysis and pattern recognition. He has published over 60 technical articles.
Electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhang, F., Yu, Y., Mao, Q. et al. Pose-robust feature learning for facial expression recognition. Front. Comput. Sci. 10, 832–844 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-5323-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-5323-3