Wavelet based approach for facial expression recognition

Abstract

Facial expression recognition is one of the most active fields of research. Many facial expression recognition methods have been developed and implemented. Neural networks (NNs) have capability to undertake such pattern recognition tasks. The key factor of the use of NN is based on its characteristics. It is capable in conducting learning and generalizing, non-linear mapping, and parallel computation. Backpropagation neural networks (BPNNs) are the approach methods that mostly used. In this study, BPNNs were used as classifier to categorize facial expression images into seven-class of expressions which are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, neutral and surprise. For the purpose of feature extraction tasks, three discrete wavelet transforms were used to decompose images, namely Haar wavelet, Daubechies (4) wavelet and Coiflet (1) wavelet. To analyze the proposed method, a facial expression recognition system was built. The proposed method was tested on static images from JAFFE database.