Recognizing facial expressions using active textures with wrinkles

This paper explores the use of facial wrinkle textures for recognizing the facial expressions. Based on the observation of the wrinkles appearance and change along with performed expressions, we propose to extract the partial texture information in both the facial organ areas (e.g., eyes and mouth) and the facial wrinkle areas, and use the texture dissimilarity between the neutral expression and the active expression to extract the active texture for the expression representation. We present a novel method using multiple levels of detail to measure the active texture dissimilarity. The rate of change between levels is used as the rule for discriminating 6 types of universal expressions. The experiments on video sequences demonstrate the simplicity and efficiency of the proposed method for recognizing expressions with an 82.8% correct recognition rate.