Modelling, classification and synthesis of facial expressions

The field of computer vision endeavours to develop automatic approaches to the interpretation of images from the real world. Over the past number of decades researchers within this field have created systems specifically for the automatic analysis of facial expression. The most successful of these approaches draw on the tools from behavioural science. In this chapter we examine facial expression analysis from both a behavioural science and a computer vision perspective. First we will provide details of the principal approach used in behavioural science to analyze facial expressions. This will include an overview of the evolution of facial expression analysis, where we introduce the field of facial expression analysis with Darwin’s initial findings (Darwin, 1872). We then go on to show how his findings were confirmed nearly 100 years later by Ekman et al. (Ekman et al., 1969). Following on from this we provide details of recent works investigating the appearance and dynamics of facial expressions