A new sparse image representation algorithm applied to facial expression recognition

In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for learning facial expressions in a supervised manner. This algorithm is derived from the local non-negative matrix factorization (LNMF) algorithm, which is an extension of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method. We call this newly proposed algorithm discriminant non-negative matrix factorization (DNMF). Given an image database, all these three algorithms decompose the database into basis images and their corresponding coefficients. This decomposition is computed differently for each method. The decomposition results are applied on facial images for the recognition of the six basic facial expressions. We found that our algorithm shows superior performance by achieving a higher recognition rate, when compared to NMF and LNMF