Facial Expression Recognition Based on NMF and SVM

A novel approach to facial expression recognition (FER) based on the combination of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and support vector machine (SVM) was proposed. One key step in FER is to extract expression features from the original face images. NMF is an effective approach to extract expression features because NMF decomposition makes the reconstruction of expression images in a non-subtractive way and is much similar to the process of forming unity from parts. The proposed algorithm first processes facial expression image with histogram equalization operator. Then NMF method is used for feature dimension reduction and SVM for classification. Finally, the algorithm was implemented with Matlab and experimented in Japanese female facial expression database (JAFEE database). A recognition rate of 66.19% was obtained and showed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.