Person-Independent Facial Expression Recognition with Histograms of Prominent Edge Directions

This paper presents a new descriptor, named Histograms of Prominent Edge Directions (HPED), for the recognition of facial expressions in a person-independent environment. In this paper, we raise the issue of sampling error in generating the code-histogram from spatial regions of the face image, as observed in the existing descriptors. HPED describes facial appearance changes based on the statistical distribution of the top two prominent edge directions (i.e., primary and secondary direction) captured over small spatial regions of the face. Compared to existing descriptors, HPED uses a smaller number of code-bins to describe the spatial regions, which helps avoid sampling error despite having fewer samples while preserving the valuable spatial information. In contrast to the existing Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that uses the histogram of the primary edge direction (i.e., gradient orientation) only, we additionally consider the histogram of the secondary edge direction, which provides more meaningful shape information related to the local texture. Experiments on popular facial expression datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed HPED against existing descriptors in a person-independent environment.