Improving Bag-of-Visual-Words Towards Effective Facial Expressive Image Classification

TL;DR

This paper enhances the Bag-of-Visual-Words approach for facial expression classification by improving feature selection, clustering, spatial encoding, and weighting, leading to better recognition rates on multiple datasets.

Contribution

It introduces a novel algorithm that addresses key limitations of BoVW in facial expression analysis, including improved clustering, spatial relationship encoding, and feature weighting.

Findings

Achieved higher recognition accuracy than standard BoVW methods.

Effectively recognized spontaneous and non-basic expressions.

Validated on multiple facial expression datasets.

Abstract

Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) approach has been widely used in the recent years for image classification purposes. However, the limitations regarding optimal feature selection, clustering technique, the lack of spatial organization of the data and the weighting of visual words are crucial. These factors affect the stability of the model and reduce performance. We propose to develop an algorithm based on BoVW for facial expression analysis which goes beyond those limitations. Thus the visual codebook is built by using k-Means++ method to avoid poor clustering. To exploit reliable low level features, we search for the best feature detector that avoids locating a large number of keypoints which do not contribute to the classification process. Then, we propose to compute the relative conjunction matrix in order to preserve the spatial order of the data by coding the relationships among visual words. In addition, a weighting scheme that reflects how important a visual word is with respect to a given image is introduced. We speed up the learning process by using histogram intersection kernel by Support Vector Machine to learn a discriminative classifier. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is compared with standard bag of visual words method and with bag of visual words method with spatial pyramid. Extensive experiments on the CK+, the MMI and the JAFFE databases show good average recognition rates. Likewise, the ability to recognize spontaneous and non-basic expressive states is investigated using the DynEmo database.