Automatic emotion recognition through facial expression analysis in merged images based on an Artificial Neural Network

This paper focuses on a system of recognizing human's emotion from a detected human's face. The analyzed information is conveyed by the regions of the eye and the mouth into a merged new image in various facial expressions pertaining to six universal basic facial emotions. The output information obtained could be fed as an input to a machine capable to interact with social skills, in the context of building socially intelligent systems. The methodology uses a classification technique of information into a new fused image which is composed of two blocks integrated by the area of the eyes and mouth, very sensitive areas to changes human's expression and that are particularly relevant for the decoding of emotional expressions. Finally we use the merged image as an input to a feed-forward neural network trained by back-propagation. Such analysis of merged images makes it possible, obtain relevant information through the combination of proper data in the same image and reduce the training set time while preserved classification rate. It is shown by experimental results that the proposed algorithm can detect emotion with good accuracy.