Recognition of human emotions from the imaging templates is useful in a wide variety of human-computer interaction and intelligent systems applications. However, the automatic recognition of facial expressions using image template matching techniques suffer from the natural variability with facial features and recording conditions. In spite of the progress achieved in facial emotion recognition in recent years, the effective and computationally simple feature selection and classification technique for emotion recognition is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient and straightforward facial emotion recognition algorithm to reduce the problem of inter-class pixel mismatch during classification. The proposed method includes the application of pixel normalization to remove intensity offsets followed-up with a Min-Max metric in a nearest neighbor classifier that is capable of suppressing feature outliers. The results indicate an improvement of recognition performance from 92.85 to 98.57 for the proposed Min-Max classification method when tested on JAFFE database. The proposed emotion recognition technique outperforms the existing template matching methods.
Over the last decade, automatic facial expression analysis has become an active research area that finds potential applications in areas such as more engaging human-computer interfaces, talking heads, image retrieval and human emotion analysis. Facial expressions reflect not only emotions, but other mental activities, social interaction and physiological signals. In this survey we introduce the most prominent automatic facial expression analysis methods and systems presented in the literature. Facial motion and deformation extraction approaches as well as classification methods are discussed with respect to issues such as face normalization, facial expression dynamics and facial expression intensity, but also with regard to their robustness towards environmental changes.  Facial expression provides an important behavioral measure for studies of emotion, cognitive processes, and social interaction. Facial expression recognition has recently become a promising research area. Its applications include human-computer interfaces, human emotion analysis, and medical care and cure. In this paper, we investigate various feature representation and expression classification schemes to recognize seven different facial expressions, such as happy, neutral, angry, disgust, sad, fear and surprise, in the JAFFE database. Experimental results show that the method of combining 2D-LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis) and SVM (Support Vector Machine) outperforms others. The recognition rate of this method is 95.71 by using leave-one-out strategy and 94.13 by using cross-validation strategy. It takes only 0.0357 second to process one image of size 256 × 256. Facial expression recognition is the most important criteria for effective Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as well as a medium to understand and communicate with children who cannot emote verbally. In this paper, we propose a feature extraction technique by embedding 2D-LDA and 2D-PCA. The features extracted were then tested on standard classifiers i.e., Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbourhood (KNN) classifiers. Facial expression images from JAFFE and Cohn-Kennedy databases were utilized for training as well as testing. Very high facial emotion recognition rate of 97.63 and 94.8 has been obtained with the proposed method for JAFFE and Cohn-Kanade databases respectively. A key issue regarding feature extraction is the capability of a technique to extract distinctive features to represent facial expressions while requiring a low computational complexity. In this study, the authors propose a novel approach for appearance-based facial feature extraction to perform the task of facial expression recognition on video sequences. The proposed spatiotemporal texture map (STTM) is capable of capturing subtle spatial and temporal variations of facial expressions with low computational complexity. First, face is detected using Viola–Jones face detector and frames are cropped to remove unnecessary background. Facial features are then modelled with the proposed STTM, which uses the spatiotemporal information extracted from three-dimensional Harris corner function. A block-based method is adopted to extract the dynamic features and represent the features in the form of histograms. The features are then classified into classes of emotion by the support vector machine classifier. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach shows superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches with an average recognition rate of 95.37, 98.56, and 84.52 on datasets containing posed expressions, spontaneous micro-expressions, and close-to-real-world expressions, respectively. They also show that the proposed algorithm requires low computational cost. Facial expressions are a valuable source of information that accompanies facial biometrics. Early detection of physiological and psycho-emotional data from facial expressions is linked to the situational awareness module of any advanced biometric system for personal state re identification. In this article, a new method that utilizes both texture and geometric information of facial fiducial points is presented. We investigate Gauss–Laguerre wavelets, which have rich frequency extraction capabilities, to extract texture information of various facial expressions. Rotation invariance and the multiscale approach of these wavelets make the feature extraction robust. Moreover, geometric positions of fiducial points provide valuable information for upper lower face action units. The combination of these two types of features is used for facial expression classification. The performance of this system has been validated on three public databases: the JAFFE, the Cohn-Kanade, and the MMI image. The Gaussian process (GP) approaches to classification synthesize Bayesian methods and kernel techniques, which are developed for the purpose of small sample analysis. Here we propose a GP model and investigate it for the facial expression recognition in the Japanese female facial expression dataset. By the strategy of leave-one-out cross validation, the accuracy of the GP classifiers reaches 93.43 without any feature selection extraction. Even when tested on all expressions of any particular expressor, the GP classifier trained by the other samples outperforms some frequently used classifiers significantly. In order to survey the robustness of this novel method, the random trial of 10-fold cross validations is repeated many times to provide an overview of recognition rates. The experimental results demonstrate a promising performance of this application. This paper presents an automatic way to discover pixels in a face image that improves the facial expression recognition results. Main contribution of our study is to provide a practical method to improve classification performance of classifiers by selecting best pixels of interest. Our method exhaustively searches for the best and worst feature window position from a set of face images among all possible combinations using MLP. Then, it creates a non-rectangular emotion mask for feature selection in supervised facial expression recognition problem. It eliminates irrelevant data and improves the classification performance using backward feature elimination. Experimental studies on GENKI, JAFFE and FERET databases showed that the proposed system improves the classification results by selecting the best pixels of interest. Abstract This paper provides a novel method for facial expression recognition, which distinguishes itself with the following two main contributions. First, an improved facial feature, called the expression-specific local binary pattern (es-LBP), is presented by emphasizing the partial information of human faces on particular fiducial points. Second, to enhance the connection between facial features and expression classes, class-regularized locality preserving projection (cr-LPP) is proposed, which aims at maximizing the class independence and simultaneously preserving the local feature similarity via dimensionality reduction. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is very effective for facial expression recognition.