An Evolutive Approach for Smile Recognition in Video Sequences

Facial expression recognition is one of the most challenging research areas in the image recognition field and has been actively studied since the 70’s. For instance, smile recognition has been studied due to the fact that it is considered an important facial expression in human communication, it is therefore likely useful for human-machine interaction. Moreover, if a smile can be detected and also its intensity estimated, it will raise the possibility of new applications in the future. We are talking about quantifying the emotion at low computation cost and high accuracy. For this aim, we have used a new support vector machine (SVM) based approach that integrates a weighted combination of local binary patterns (LBPs) and principal component analysis (PCA) based approaches. Furthermore, we construct this smile detector considering the evolution of the emotion along its natural life cycle. As a consequence, we achieved both low computation cost and high performance with video sequences.