Automatic 3D facial expression recognition using geometric and textured feature fusion

3D facial expression recognition has gained more and more interests from affective computing society due to issues such as pose variations and illumination changes caused by 2D imaging having been eliminated. There are many applications that can benefit from this research, such as medical applications involving the detection of pain and psychological effects in patients, in human-computer interaction tasks that intelligent systems use in today´s world. In this paper, we look into 3D Facial Expression Recognition, by investigating many feature extraction methods used on the 2D textured images and 3D geometric data, fusing the 2 domains to increase the overall performance. A One Vs All Multi-class SVM Classifier has been adopted to recognize the expressions Angry, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Neutral, Sad and Surprise from the BU-3DFE and Bosphorus databases. The proposed approach displays an increase in performance when the features are fused together.