Learning the Discriminate Patches from the Key Landmarks for Facial Expression Recognition

Extraction of discriminate features which could represent the facial expression accurately plays a vital role in effective Facial Expression Recognition (FER). Although much progress has been made, selecting the discriminate features is still a challenging and interesting problem in the FER system. In this paper, we propose a new FER method, which uses the active shape mode (ASM) algorithm to landmark the key points of face, then extracts local binary patterns (LBP) features around the key points and uses the Multi-Task Learning (MTL) algorithm to select the discriminate patches to represent facial expression accurately. Then we use uses support vector machine (SVM) classifier to predict the facial emotion. Experiments on the Extended Cohn-Kanada database show that the proposed method has a promising performance and realizes the recognition rate of 96.44%.