A novel two-stage illumination estimation framework for expression recognition.

One of the critical issues for facial expression recognition is to eliminate the negative effect caused by variant poses and illuminations. In this paper a two-stage illumination estimation framework is proposed based on three-dimensional representative face and clustering, which can estimate illumination directions under a series of poses. First, 256 training 3D face models are adaptively categorized into a certain amount of facial structure types by k-means clustering to group people with similar facial appearance into clusters. Then the representative face of each cluster is generated to represent the facial appearance type of that cluster. Our training set is obtained by rotating all representative faces to a certain pose, illuminating them with a series of different illumination conditions, and then projecting them into two-dimensional images. Finally the saltire-over-cross feature is selected to train a group of SVM classifiers and satisfactory performance is achieved when estimating a number of test sets including images generated from 64 3D face models kept for testing, CAS-PEAL face database, CMU PIE database, and a small test set created by ourselves. Compared with other related works, our method is subject independent and has less computational complexity O(C × N) without 3D facial reconstruction.