Recognition of Facial Expressions in the Presence of Occlusion

We present a new approach for the recognition of facial expressions from video sequences in the presence of occlusion. Although promising results have been reported in the literature on automatic recognition of facial expressions, most techniques have been assessed using experiments performed in controlled laboratory conditions which do not reflect real-world conditions. The goal of the work presented herein, is to develop recognition techniques that will overcome some limitations of current techniques, such as their sensitivity to partial occlusion of the face. The proposed approach is based on a localised representation of facial features, and on data fusion. The experiments show that the proposed approach is robust to partial occlusion of the face.