Facial expression recognition using salient facial patches

This paper proposes a novel facial expression recognition method composed of two main steps: offline step and online step. The offline step selects the most salient facial patches using mutual information technique. The online step relies on the already selected patches to identify the facial expression using an SVM classifier. In both steps, the LBP operator was used to extract facial expressions features. Through an extensive experiments on the JAFFE and KANADE databases, we have shown that our method, thanks to the salient selected patches, has the advantage of being much faster with a significant gain in recognition performance.