Customizable facial expression recognition using non-negative matrix factorization

Automatic recognition of facial expression remains a challenging task in computer vision, because of large amount of image data and subtle difference in facial expressions. In this paper, we present a customizable system for facial expression recognition using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF).Our system can be described in two major phases: the first phase uses preprocessing and the NMF for decomposing facial expression images into a set of basis images; the second phase incorporates dimensionality reduction and similarity to classify if an input image depicts one of the five facial expressions (i.e., normal, smile, sad, surprise, and angry) given known facial expressions as template images. Our results clearly demonstrate that the system was able to provide an effective basis for characterizing facial feature regions and reasonable classification in various facial expressions.