Internet communication using real-time facial expression analysis and synthesis

This chapter describes a probabilistic framework for faithful reproduction of spontaneous facial expressions on a synthetic face model in a real time interactive application. The framework consists of a coupled Bayesian network (BN) to unify the facial expression analysis and synthesis into one coherent structure. At the analysis end, we cast the facial action coding system (FACS) into a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) to capture relationships between facial expressions and the facial motions as well as their uncertainties and dynamics. The observations fed into the DBN facial expression model are measurements of facial action units (AUs) generated by an AU model. Also implemented by a DBN, the AU model captures the rigid head movements and nonrigid facial muscular movements of a spontaneous facial expression. At the synthesizer, a static BN reconstructs the Facial Animation Parameters (FAPs) and their intensity through the top-down inference according to the current state of facial expression and pose information output by the analysis end. The two BNs are connected statically through a data stream link. The novelty of using the coupled BN brings about several benefits. First, a facial expression is inferred through both spatial and temporal inference so that the perceptual quality of animation is less affected by the misdetection of facial features. Second, more realistic looking facial expressions can be reproduced by modeling the dynamics of human expressions in facial expression analysis. Third, very low bitrate (9 bytes per frame) in data transmission can be achieved.

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Facial Expression Analysis using Convolutional Neural Networks

International Journal of Engineering and Advanced Technology - Regular Issue ◽

10.35940/ijeat.d8335.049420 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (4) ◽

pp. 1142-1146

Keyword(s):

Neural Networks ◽

Facial Expression ◽

Real Time ◽

Facial Expressions ◽

Convolutional Neural Networks ◽

Expression Analysis ◽

Facial Expression Recognition ◽

Expression Recognition ◽

Real Time System ◽

Facial Expression Analysis

Human feelings are mental conditions of sentiments that emerge immediately as opposed to cognitive exertion. Some of the basic feelings are happy, angry, neutral, sad and surprise. These internal feelings of a person are reflected on the face as Facial Expressions. This paper presents a novel methodology for Facial Expression Analysis which will aid to develop a facial expression recognition system. This system can be used in real time to classify five basic emotions. The recognition of facial expressions is important because of its applications in many domains such as artificial intelligence, security and robotics. Many different approaches can be used to overcome the problems of Facial Expression Recognition (FER) but the best suited technique for automated FER is Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN). Thus, a novel CNN architecture is proposed and a combination of multiple datasets such as FER2013, FER+, JAFFE and CK+ is used for training and testing. This helps to improve the accuracy and develop a robust real time system. The proposed methodology confers quite good results and the obtained accuracy may give encouragement and offer support to researchers to build better models for Automated Facial Expression Recognition systems.

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