Robust facial expression recognition via compressive sensing

Recently, compressive sensing (CS) has attracted increasing attention in the areas of signal processing, computer vision and pattern recognition. In this paper, a new method based on the CS theory is presented for robust facial expression recognition. The CS theory is used to construct a sparse representation classifier (SRC). The effectiveness and robustness of the SRC method is investigated on clean and occluded facial expression images. Three typical facial features, i.e., the raw pixels, Gabor wavelets representation and local binary patterns (LBP), are extracted to evaluate the performance of the SRC method. Compared with the nearest neighbor (NN), linear support vector machines (SVM) and the nearest subspace (NS), experimental results on the popular Cohn-Kanade facial expression database demonstrate that the SRC method obtains better performance and stronger robustness to corruption and occlusion on robust facial expression recognition tasks.