Novel Descriptors for Effective Recognition of Face and Facial Expressions

Abstract

In this paper, we present a face recognition approach based on extended Histogram Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptors to extract the facial expressions features allowing classifying the faces and facial expressions. The approach is based on determining the different directional codes on the face image based on edge response values to define the feature vector from the face image. Its size is reduced to improve the performance of the SVM (Support Vector Machine) classifier. Experiments are conducted using two public datasets: JAFFE for facial expression recognition and YALE for face recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptor achieves recognition rate of 92.12% and execution time ranging from 0.4s to 0.7s in all evaluated databases compared with existing works. Experiments demonstrate and confirm both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed descriptor.