Facial Expression Recognition as an Implicit Customers’ Feedback

In social interaction, face is playing an important role. Social psychology researches had agreed that among the three mediums in communication, facial expression is the one that is always active. Mehrabian [1] indicated that the verbal part of a message contributes only for 7 percent to the effect of the message as a whole; the vocal part contributes for 38 percent, while facial expression of the speaker contributes for 55 percent to the effect of the spoken message. Psychologists Paul Ekman and Friesen in 1978 had come with a method to classifying muscle movement to measure the facial expression. This method, which later became the mostly used in classifying facial movement in behavioral science, is called Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Most of the research work on Facial Expression Recognition refers to the Facial Action Coding System. Paul Ekman [2], believed that basic emotion is universal, though he challenge those who can claim otherwise. The universality of emotion expression proposed by (Ekman,1999) was supported by various researchers. The study of emotion universality [3] using American and Indian to recognize emotion expression of 45 selected pictures had convinced that there is existence of universality in emotion expression. People from different backgrounds display similar expression in respond to similar stimuli [4], but it is reasonable to expect local variations. Thus Ekman suggested that extreme positions regarding the universality of emotion are incomplete. Seven Basic emotions established are; happy, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, and contempt.