Expression-invariant facial identification

Facial identification has been recognized as most simple and non-intrusive technology that can be applied in many places. However, there are still many unsolved facial identification problems due to different intra-personal variations. In particular, when images of the databases appear at different facial expressions, most currently available facial recognition approaches encounter the expression-invariant problem in which neutral faces are difficult to be recognized. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to transform facial expressions to neutral-face like images; hence enabling image retrieval systems to robustly identify a person´s face for which its learning and testing face images differ in facial expression.