Effect of Smile on Facial Landmark based Face Recognition

Smile reveals distinctive facial features that makes a face more recognizable. However, little is known about the impact of smile on face recognition accuracy, especially in the context of automated face recognition systems using traditional machine learning algorithms. This is an important topic to study because understanding the influence of smile on face recognition could contribute to improve the performance of various applications that use face recognition underneath. In this paper, we propose a handful of novel features to capture the effect of smile on faces. With the new feature set, we then apply several machine learning algorithms on the data set that includes a comprehensive set of both smiling and neutral facial images of people with different gender, ethnicity and age groups. Our experimental result suggests that smiling faces produce high discriminating power that can be used effectively by the machine-learning algorithms to improve their accuracy and fairness.