Facial Expression Recognition using Discrete Cosine Transform & Artificial Neural Network

Every so often Humans utilize non-verbal gestures (e.g. facial expressions) to express certain information or emotions. Moreover, countless face gestures are expressed throughout the day because of the capabilities possessed by humans. However, the channels of these expression/emotions can be through activities, postures, behaviors & facial expressions. Extensive research unveiled that there exists a strong relationship between the channels and emotions which has to be further investigated. An Automatic Facial Expression Recognition (AFER) framework has been proposed in this work that can predict or anticipate seven universal expressions. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, Frontal face Image Database also named as Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) is opted as input. This database is further processed with a frequency domain technique known as Discrete Cosine transform (DCT) and then classified using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). So as to check the robustness of this novel strategy, the random trial of K-fold cross validation, leave one out and person independent methods is repeated many times to provide an overview of recognition rates. The experimental results demonstrate a promising performance of this application.