Gabor Filter Selection and Computational Processing for Emotion Recognition

CrowdEmotion produce software to measure a person's emotions based on analysis of microfacial expressions using a machine learning algorithm to recognize which features correspond with which emotions. The features are derived by applying a bank of Gabor filters to a set of frames. CrowdEmotion needed to improve the accuracy, processing speed and cost-efficiency of the tool. In particular they wanted to know if a subset of the bank of Gabor filters was sufficient, and whether the image filtering stage could be implemented on a GPU. A framework for choosing the optimum set of Gabor filters was established and ways of reducing the dimensionality of this were interrogated. Taking a subset of Local Binary Patterns was found to be fully justified. Meanwhile choosing a gridding pattern is open to interpretation; some suggestions were made about how this choice might be improved.