Recognition of Facial Expressions with Autoencoders and Convolutional-Nets
Humans communicate via different types of channels: words, voice, body gesture, emotions …etc.  For this reason, implementing these channels in computers is inevitable to make them interact intelligently with humans. Using a webcam and a microphone, computers should figure out what we want to tell from our voice, gesture and face emotions. In this thesis we are interested in figuring human emotions from their images or video in order to use that later in different applications. The thesis starts by giving an introduction to machine learning and some of the models and algorithms we used like multilayer perceptron, convolutional neural networks, autoencoders and finally report the results of applying these models on several facial emotion expression datasets.  We moreover concentrate on studying different kinds of autoencoders (Denoising Autoencoder , Contractive Autoencoder, …etc.) and identify some limitations like the possibility of obtaining filters co-adaptation and undesirably smooth spectral curve and we investigate new ideas to address these problems. We also overcome the limitations of training autoencoders in a purely unsupervised manner, i.e. without using any knowledge of task we ultimately want to solve (such as predicting class labels) and develop a new semi-supervised training criterion which exploits the knowledge of the few labeled data to train the autoencoder together with a large amount of unlabeled data in order to learn a representation better suited for the classification task, and obtain better classification performance. Finally, we describe the general pipeline for our emotion detection system and suggest new ideas for future work.
Artificial intelligence Machine learning Neural nets Autoencoders Unsupervised pre-training Deep learning Dropout