Hidden Markov Model Decision Forest for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expressions can be mainly conveyed by only a few discriminative facial regions of interest. In this paper, we study the discriminative regions for facial expression recognition from video sequences. The goal of our method is to explore and make use of the discriminative regions for different facial expressions. For this purpose, we propose a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) Decision Forest (HMMDF). In this framework, each tree node is a discriminative classifier, which is constructed by combining weighted HMMs. Motivated by a psychological theory of "elimination by aspects", several HMMs on each node are modeled respectively for facial regions, which have discriminative capabilities for classification. The weights for these HMMs can be further adjusted according to the contributions of facial regions. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of discriminative regions on facial expression, and the experimental results show that the proposed HMMDF framework yields dramatic improvements in facial expression recognition compared to existing methods.