Detection of emotions from video in non-controlled environment. (Détection des émotions à partir de vidéos dans un environnement non contrôlé)

Communication in any form i.e. verbal or non-verbal is vital to complete various daily routine tasks and plays a significant role in life. Facial expression is the most effective form of non-verbal communication and it provides a clue about emotional state, mindset and intention. Generally automatic facial expression recognition framework consists of three step: face tracking, feature extraction and expression classification. In order to built robust facial expression recognition framework that is capable of producing reliable results, it is necessary to extract features (from the appropriate facial regions) that have strong discriminative abilities. Recently different methods for automatic facial expression recognition have been proposed, but invariably they all are computationally expensive and spend computational time on whole face image or divides the facial image based on some mathematical or geometrical heuristic for features extraction. None of them take inspiration from the human visual system in completing the same task. In this research thesis we took inspiration from the human visual system in order to find from where (facial region) to extract features. We argue that the task of expression analysis and recognition could be done in more conducive manner, if only some regions are selected for further processing (i.e. salient regions) as it happens in human visual system. In this research thesis we have proposed different frameworks for automatic recognition of expressions, all getting inspiration from the human vision. Every subsequently proposed addresses the shortcomings of the previously proposed framework. Our proposed frameworks in general, achieve results that exceeds state-of-the-art methods for expression recognition. Secondly, they are computationally efficient and simple as they process only perceptually salient region(s) of face for feature extraction. By processing only perceptually salient region(s) of the face, reduction in feature vector dimensionality and reduction in computational time for feature extraction is achieved. Thus making them suitable for real-time applications.