Weighted Fusion of Bit Plane-Specific Local Image Descriptors for Facial Expression Recognition

Automated recognition of facial expression has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its potential applicability in security and surveillance, human computer interaction, social robotics, and animation. This paper presents a new facial expression recognition method that utilizes bit plane specific local image description in a weighted score level fusion. The motivation is to utilize bit plane slicing to highlight the contribution of a particular bit plane made to the holistic facial appearance, which is then used in a weighted score level fusion in order to boost the recognition performance. A new local image descriptor is proposed specifically to extract local features from bit plane representations that utilizes Fisher linear discriminant to maximize the inter-class distance, while minimizing the intra-class variance. Two well-known facial expression databases, namely the Cohn-Kanade (CK) and the Japanese female facial expression (JAFFE) database have been used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method against existing facial appearance descriptors, such as local binary pattern (LBP), local ternary pattern (LTP), local directional pattern (LDP), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Experiments with a total of seven prototypic facial expressions show promising results for the proposed method, as compared with the other existing methods.