Facial Expression Recognition with LBP and ORB Features

Emotion plays an important role in communication. For human–computer interaction, facial expression recognition has become an indispensable part. Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in this field and they overcome the limitations of conventional approaches. However, application of DNNs is very limited due to excessive hardware specifications requirement. Considering low hardware specifications used in real-life conditions, to gain better results without DNNs, in this paper, we propose an algorithm with the combination of the oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB) features and Local Binary Patterns (LBP) features extracted from facial expression. First of all, every image is passed through face detection algorithm to extract more effective features. Second, in order to increase computational speed, the ORB and LBP features are extracted from the face region; specifically, region division is innovatively employed in the traditional ORB to avoid the concentration of the features. The features are invariant to scale and grayscale as well as rotation changes. Finally, the combined features are classified by Support Vector Machine (SVM). The proposed method is evaluated on several challenging databases such as Cohn-Kanade database (CK+), Japanese Female Facial Expressions database (JAFFE), and MMI database; experimental results of seven emotion state (neutral, joy, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust) show that the proposed framework is effective and accurate.