Shape analysis of local facial patches for 3D facial expression recognition

International audienceIn this paper we address the problem of 3D facial expression recognition. We propose a local geometric shape analysis of facial surfaces coupled with machine learning techniques for expression classification. A computation of the length of the geodesic path between corresponding patches, using a Riemannian framework, in a shape space provides a quantitative information about their similarities. These measures are then used as inputs to several classification methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Using Multi-boosting and Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifiers, we achieved 98.81% and 97.75% recognition average rates, respectively, for recognition of the six prototypical facial expressions on BU-3DFE database. A comparative study using the same experimental setting shows that the suggested approach outperforms previous work