Deep peak-neutral difference feature for facial expression recognition

Facial expression recognition (FER) is important in vision-related applications. Deep neural networks demonstrate impressive performance for face recognition; however, it should be noted that this method relies heavily on a great deal of manually labeled training data, which is not available for facial expressions in real-world applications. Hence, we propose a powerful facial feature called deep peak–neutral difference (DPND) for FER. DPND is defined as the difference between two deep representations of the fully expressive (peak) and neutral facial expression frames. The difference tends to emphasize the facial parts that are changed in the transition from the neutral to the expressive face and to eliminate the face identity information retained in the fine-tuned deep neural network for facial expression, the network has been trained on large-scale face recognition dataset. Furthermore, unsupervised clustering and semi-supervised classification methods are presented to automatically acquire the neutral and peak frames from the expression sequence. The proposed facial expression feature achieved encouraging results on public databases, which suggests that it has strong potential to recognize facial expressions in real-world applications.