A method of facial expression recognition based on Gabor and NMF

The technology of facial expression recognition is a challenging problem in the field of intelligent human-computer interaction. An algorithm based on the Gabor wavelet transformation and non-negative matrix factorization (G-NMF) is presented. The main process includes image preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. At first, the face region containing emotional information is obtained and normalized. Then, expressional features are extracted by Gabor wavelet transformation and the high-dimensional data are reduced by non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). Finally, two-layer classifier (TLC) is designed for expression recognition. Experiments are done on JAFFE facial expressions database. The results show that the method proposed has a better performance.