A spatiotemporal feature-based approach for facial expression recognition from depth video

Abstract

In this paper, a novel spatiotemporal feature-based method is proposed to recognize facial expressions from depth video. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) spatial features of the depth faces of facial expressions are first augmented with the optical flow motion features. Then, the augmented features are enhanced by Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis (FLDA) to make them robust. The features are then combined with on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to model different facial expressions that are later used to recognize appropriate expression from a test expression depth video. The experimental results show superior performance of the proposed approach over the conventional methods.