Recognition of facial expressions using Gabor wavelets and learning vector quantization

Facial expression recognition has potential applications in different aspects of day-to-day life not yet realized due to absence of effective expression recognition techniques. This paper discusses the application of Gabor filter based feature extraction in combination with learning vector quantization (LVQ) for recognition of seven different facial expressions from still pictures of the human face. The results presented here are better in several aspects from earlier work in facial expression recognition. Firstly, it is observed that LVQ based feature classification technique proposed in this study performs better in recognizing fear expressions than multilayer perceptron (MLP) based classification technique used in earlier work. Secondly, this study indicates that the Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) database contains expressers that expressed expressions incorrectly and these incorrect images adversely affect the development of a reliable facial expression recognition system. By excluding the two expressers from the data set, an improvement in recognition rate from 87.51% to 90.22% has been achieved. The present study, therefore, proves the feasibility of computer vision based facial expression recognition for practical applications like surveillance and human computer interaction.