Unifying Geometric Features and Facial Action Units for Improved Performance of Facial Expression Analysis

Previous approaches to model and analyze facial expression analysis use three different techniques: facial action units, geometric features and graph based modelling. However, previous approaches have treated these technique separately. There is an interrelationship between these techniques. The facial expression analysis is significantly improved by utilizing these mappings between major geometric features involved in facial expressions and the subset of facial action units whose presence or absence are unique to a facial expression. This paper combines dimension reduction techniques and image classification with search space pruning achieved by this unique subset of facial action units to significantly prune the search space. The performance results on the publicly facial expression database shows an improvement in performance by 70% over time while maintaining the emotion recognition correctness.