Effective Emotional Classification Combining Facial Classifiers and User Assessment

An effective method for the automatic classification of facial expressions into emotional categories is presented. The system is able to classify the user facial expression in terms of the six Ekman’s universal emotions (plus the neutral one), giving a membership confidence value to each emotional category. The method is capable of analysing any subject, male or female of any age and ethnicity. The classification strategy is based on a combination (weighted majority voting) of the five most used classifiers. Another significant difference with other works is that human assessment is taken into account in the evaluation of the results. The information obtained from the users classification makes it possible to verify the validity of our results and to increase the performance of our method.