Facial expression classification based on local spatiotemporal edge and texture descriptors

Facial expressions are emotionally, socially and otherwise meaningful reflective signals in the face. Facial expressions play a critical role in human life, providing an important channel of nonverbal communication. Automation of the entire process of expression analysis can potentially facilitate human-computer interaction, making it to resemble mechanisms of human-human communication. In this paper, we present an ongoing research that aims at development of a novel spatiotemporal approach to expression classification in video. The novelty comes from a new facial representation that is based on local spatiotemporal feature descriptors. In particular, a combined dynamic edge and texture information is used for reliable description of both appearance and motion of the expression. Support vector machines are utilized to perform a final expression classification. The planned experiments will further systematically evaluate the performance of the developed method with several databases of complex facial expressions.