The performance of facial expression recognition (FER) would be degraded due to some factors such as individual differences, Gaussian random noise and so on. Prior feature extraction methods like Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Gabor filters require explicit expression components, which are always unavailable and difficult to obtain. To make the facial expression recognition (FER) more robust, we propose a novel FER approach based on low-rank sparse error dictionary (LRSE) to remit the side-effect caused by the problems above. Then the query samples can be represented and classified by a probabilistic collaborative representation based classifier (ProCRC), which exploits the maximum likelihood that the query sample belonging to the collaborative subspace of all classes can be better computed. The final classification is performed by seeking which class has the maximum probability. The proposed approach which exploits ProCRC associated with the LRSE features (LRSE ProCRC) for robust FER reaches higher average accuracies on the different databases (i.e., 79.39% on KDEF database, 89.54% on CAS-PEAL database, 84.45% on CK+ database etc.). In addition, our method also leads to state-of-the-art classification results from the aspect of feature extraction methods, training samples, Gaussian noise variances and classification based methods on benchmark databases.
