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Facial Expression Recognition

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Biometrics

Synonyms

Facial Expression Analysis; Facial Action Coding

Definition

Facial expression recognition is a process performed by humans or computers, which consists of:

  1. 1.

    Locating faces in the scene (e.g., in an image; this step is also referred to as face detection),

  2. 2.

    Extracting facial features from the detected face region (e.g., detecting the shape of facial components or describing the texture of the skin in a facial area; this step is referred to as facial feature extraction),

  3. 3.

    Analyzing the motion of facial features and/or the changes in the appearance of facial features and classifying this information into some facial-expression-interpretative categories such as facial muscle activations like smile or frown, emotion (affect) categories like happiness or anger, attitude categories like (dis)liking or ambivalence, etc. (this step is also referred to as facial expression interpretation).

Introduction

A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background,...

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References

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Pantic, M. (2009). Facial Expression Recognition. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73003-5_98

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