Extraction and Selection of Muscle Based Features for Facial Expression Recognition

In this study we propose a new set of muscle activity based features for facial expression recognition. We extract muscular activities by observing the displacements of facial feature points in an expression video. The facial feature points are initialized on muscular regions of influence in the first frame of the video. These points are tracked through optical flow in sequential frames. Displacements of feature points on the image plane are used to estimate the 3D orientation of a head model and relative displacements of its vertices. We model the human skin as a linear system of equations. The estimated deformation of the wireframe model produces an over-determined system of equations that can be solved under the constraint of the facial anatomy to obtain muscle activation levels. We apply sequential forward feature selection to choose the most descriptive set of muscles for recognition of basic facial expressions.