Multiclass support vector machines and metric multidimensional scaling for facial expression recognition

In this paper, a novel method for the recognition of facial expressions in videos is proposed. The system first extracts the deformed Candide facial grid that corresponds to the facial expression depicted in the video sequence. The mean Euclidean distance of the deformed grids is then calculated to create a new metric multidimensional scaling. The classification of the sample under examination to one of the 7 possible classes of facial expressions, i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and neutral, is performed using multiclass SVMs defined in the new space. The experiments were performed using the Cohn-Kanade database and the results show that the above mentioned system can achieve an accuracy of 95.6%.