Robust automatic facial expression detection method based on sparse representation plus LBP map

Abstract Recently the sparse representation based classification (SRC) is successfully used to automatically recognize facial expression, well-known for its ability to solve occlusion and corruption problems. The results of those methods which using different features conjunction with SRC framework show state of the art performance on clean or noised facial expression images. Therefore, the role of feature extraction for SRC framework will greatly affect the success of facial expression recognition (FER). In this paper, we select a new feature which called LBP map. This feature is generated using local binary pattern (LBP) operator. It is not only robust to gray-scale variation, but also extracts sufficient texture information for SRC to deal with FER problem. Then we proposed a new method using the LBP map conjunction with the SRC framework. Firstly, we compared our method with state of the art published work. Then experiments on the Cohn–Kanade database show that the LBP map + SRC can reach the highest accuracy with the lowest time-consuming on clean face images than those methods which use different features such as raw image, Downsample image, Eigenfaces, Laplacianfaces and Gabor conjunction with SRC. We also experiment the LBP map + SRC to recognize face image with partial occluded and corrupted, the result shows that this method is more robust to occlusion and corruption than existing methods based on SRC framework.