PCA-based dictionary building for accurate facial expression recognition via sparse representation

Sparse representation is a new approach that has received significant attention for image classification and recognition. This paper presents a PCA-based dictionary building for sparse representation and classification of universal facial expressions. In our method, expressive facials images of each subject are subtracted from a neutral facial image of the same subject. Then the PCA is applied to these difference images to model the variations within each class of facial expressions. The learned principal components are used as the atoms of the dictionary. In the classification step, a given test image is sparsely represented as a linear combination of the principal components of six basic facial expressions. Our extensive experiments on several publicly available face datasets (QC+, MMI, and Bosphorus datasets) show that our framework outperforms the recognition rate of the state-of-the-art techniques by about 6%. This approach is promising and can further be applied to visual object recognition. (c) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.