Tracking facial features with occlusions

Facial expression recognition consists of determining what kind of emotional content is presented in a human face. The problem presents a complex area for exploration, since it encompasses face acquisition, facial feature tracking, facial expression classification. Facial feature tracking is of the most interest. Active Appearance Model (AAM) enables accurate tracking of facial features in real-time, but lacks occlusions and self-occlusions. In this paper we propose a solution to improve the accuracy of fitting technique. The idea is to include occluded images into AAM training data. We demonstrate the results by running experiments using gradient descent algorithm for fitting the AAM. Our experiments show that using fitting algorithm with occluded training data improves the fitting quality of the algorithm