Facial Emotion Distribution Learning by Exploiting Low-Rank Label Correlations Locally

Emotion recognition from facial expressions is an interesting and challenging problem and has attracted much attention in recent years. Substantial previous research has only been able to address the ambiguity of “what describes the expression”, which assumes that each facial expression is associated with one or more predefined affective labels while ignoring the fact that multiple emotions always have different intensities in a single picture. Therefore, to depict facial expressions more accurately, this paper adopts a label distribution learning approach for emotion recognition that can address the ambiguity of “how to describe the expression” and proposes an emotion distribution learning method that exploits label correlations locally. Moreover, a local low-rank structure is employed to capture the local label correlations implicitly. Experiments on benchmark facial expression datasets demonstrate that our method can better address the emotion distribution recognition problem than state-of-the-art methods.