Methodical Analysis of Western-Caucasian and East-Asian Basic Facial Expressions of Emotions Based on Specific Facial Regions

Facial expressions are the straight link for showing human emotions. Psychologists have established the universality of six prototypic basic facial expressions of emotions which they believe are consistent among cultures and races. However, some recent cross-cultural studies have questioned and to some degree refuted this cultural universality. Therefore, in order to contribute to the theory of cultural specificity of basic expressions, from a composite viewpoint of psychology and HCI (Human Computer Interaction), this paper presents a methodical analysis of Western-Caucasian and East-Asian prototypic expressions focused on four facial regions: forehead, eyes-eyebrows, mouth and nose. Our analysis is based on facial expression recognition and visual analysis of facial expression images of two datasets composed by four standard databases CK+, JAFFE, TFEID and JACFEE. A hybrid feature extraction method based on Fourier coefficients is proposed for the recognition analysis. In addition, we present a cross-cultural human study applied to 40 subjects as a baseline, as well as one comparison of facial expression recognition performance between the previous cross-cultural tests from the literature. With this work, it is possible to clarify the prior considerations for working with multicultural facial expression recognition and contribute to identifying the specific facial expression differences between Western-Caucasian and East-Asian basic expressions of emotions.