Emotion Detection via Discriminant Laplacian Embedding

Human emotion detection is of substantial importance in a variety of pervasive applications in assistive environments. Because facial expressions provide a key mechanism for understanding and conveying emotion, automatic emotion detection through facial expression recognition has attracted increased attention in both scientific research and practical applications in recent years. Traditional facial expression recognition methods normally use only one type of facial expression data, either static data extracted from one single face image or motion-dependent data obtained from dynamic face image sequences, but seldom employ both. This work proposes to place the emotion detection problem under the framework of Discriminant Laplacian Embedding (DLE) to integrate these two types of facial expression data in a shared subspace, such that the advantages of both of them are exploited. Due to the reinforcement between the two types of facial features, the new data representation is more discriminative and easier to classify. Encouraging experimental results in empirical studies demonstrate the practical usage of the proposed DLE method for emotion detection.