Face Recognition Through Different Facial Expressions

Face recognition has become an accessible issue for experts as well as ordinary people as it is a focal non-interfering biometric modality. In this paper, we introduced a new approach to perform face recognition under varying facial expressions. The proposed approach consists of two main steps: facial expression recognition and face recognition. They are two complementary steps to improve face recognition across facial expression variation. In the first step, we selected the most expressive regions responsible for facial expression appearance using the Mutual Information technique. Such a process helps not only improve the facial expression classification accuracy but also reduce the features vector size. In the second step, we used the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to build EigenFaces for each facial expression class. Then, a face recognition is performed by projecting the face onto the corresponding facial expression Eigenfaces. The PCA technique significantly reduces the dimensionality of the original space since the face recognition is carried out in the reduced Eigenfaces space. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach in terms of face recognition accuracy and spatial-temporal complexity.