3D facial expression recognition based on automatically selected features

In this paper, the problem of person-independent facial expression recognition from 3D facial shapes is investigated. We propose a novel automatic feature selection method based on maximizing the average relative entropy of marginalized class-conditional feature distributions and apply it to a complete pool of candidate features composed of normalized Euclidean distances between 83 facial feature points in the 3D space. Using a regularized multi-class AdaBoost classification algorithm, we achieve a 95.1% average recognition rate for six universal facial expressions on the publicly available 3D facial expression database BU-3DFE [1], with a highest average recognition rate of 99.2% for the recognition of surprise. We compare these results with the results based on a set of manually devised features and demonstrate that the auto features yield better results than the manual features. Our results outperform the results presented in the previous work [2] and [3], namely average recognition rates of 83.6% and 91.3% on the same database, respectively.