Investigating Spontaneous Facial Action Recognition through AAM Representations of the Face

Abstract

How one should represent the face for effective action unit recognition is the main topic of interest in this chapter. This interest is motivated by the plethora of work in existence in other areas of face analysis, such as face recognition [Zhao et al., 2003], that demonstrate the benefit of representation when performing recognition tasks. It is well understood in the field of statistical pattern recognition [Duda et al., 2001] given a fixed classifier and training set that how one represents a pattern can greatly effect recognition performance. The face can be represented in a myriad of ways. Much work in facial action recognition has centered solely on the appearance (i.e., pixel values) of the face given quite a basic alignment (e.g., eyes and nose). In our work we investigate the employment of the Active Appearance Model (AAM) framework [Cootes et al., 2001, Matthews and Baker, 2004] in order to derive effective representations for facial action recognition.