Spontaneous Facial Expression Recognition Based on Histogram of Oriented Gradients Descriptor

Automatically detecting facial expressions has become an important research area. It plays a significant role in security, human-computer interaction and health-care. Yet, earlier work focuses on posed facial expression. In this paper, we propose a spontaneous facial expression recognition method based on effective feature extraction and facial expression recognition for Micro Expression analysis. In feature extraction we used histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) descriptor to extract facial expression features. Expression recognition is performed by using a Support vector machine (SVM) classifier to recognize six emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, fear, sadness and surprise). Experiments show promising results of the proposed method with recognition accuracy of 95% on static images while 80% on videos.