Region Based Robust Facial Expression Analysis

Facial emotion recognition is an essential aspect in human-machine interaction. In the real-world conditions, it faces many challenges, i.e., illumination changes, large pose variations and partial or full occlusions, which cause different facial areas with different sharpness and completeness. Inspired by this fact, we focus on facial expression recognition based on partial faces in this paper. We compare contribution of seven facial areas of low-resolution images, including nose areas, mouse areas, eyes areas, nose to mouse areas, nose to eyes areas, mouth to eyes areas and the whole face areas. Through analysis on the confusion matrix and the class activation map, we find that mouth regions contain much emotional information compared with nose areas and eyes areas. In the meantime, considering larger facial areas is helpful to judge the expression more precisely. To sum up, contributions of this paper are two-fold: (1) We reveal concerned areas of human in emotion recognition. (2) We quantify the contribution of different facial parts.