An accurate recognition of facial expression by extended wavelet deep convolutional neural network

Facial expressions are essential in community based interactions and in the analysis of emotions behaviour. The automatic identification of face is a motivating topic for the researchers because of its numerous applications like health care, video conferencing, cognitive science etc. In the computer vision with the facial images, the automatic detection of facial expression is a very challenging issue to be resolved. An innovative methodology is introduced in the presented work for the recognition of facial expressions. The presented methodology is described in subsequent stages. At first, input image is taken from the facial expression database and pre-processed with high frequency emphasis (HFE) filtering and modified histogram equalization (MHE). After the process of image enhancement, Viola Jones (VJ) framework is utilized to detect the face in the images and also the face region is cropped by finding the face coordinates. Afterwards, different effective features such as shape information is extracted from enhanced histogram of gradient (EHOG feature), intensity variation is extracted with mean, standard deviation and skewness, facial movement variation is extracted with facial action coding (FAC),texture is extracted using weighted patch based local binary pattern (WLBP) and spatial information is extracted byentropy based Spatial feature. Subsequently, dimensionality of the features are reduced by attaining the most relevant features using Residual Network (ResNet). Finally, extended wavelet deep convolutional neural network (EWDCNN) classifier uses the extracted features and accurately detects the face expressions as sad, happy, anger, fear disgust, surprise and neutral classes. The implementation platform used in the work is PYTHON. The presented technique is tested with the three datasets such as JAFFE, CK+ and Oulu-CASIA.