Enhanced facial expression recognition using 3D point sets and geometric deep learning

Facial expression recognition plays an essential role in human conversation and human–computer interaction. Previous research studies have recognized facial expressions mainly based on 2D image processing requiring sensitive feature engineering and conventional machine learning approaches. The purpose of the present study was to recognize facial expressions by applying a new class of deep learning called geometric deep learning directly on 3D point cloud data. Two databases (Bosphorus and SIAT-3DFE) were used. The Bosphorus database includes sixty-five subjects with seven basic expressions (i.e., anger, disgust, fearness, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral). The SIAT-3DFE database has 150 subjects and 4 basic facial expressions (neutral, happiness, sadness, and surprise). First, preprocessing procedures such as face center cropping, data augmentation, and point cloud denoising were applied on 3D face scans. Then, a geometric deep learning model called PointNet++ was applied. A hyperparameter tuning process was performed to find the optimal model parameters. Finally, the developed model was evaluated using the recognition rate and confusion matrix. The facial expression recognition accuracy on the Bosphorus database was 69.01% for 7 expressions and could reach 85.85% when recognizing five specific expressions (anger, disgust, happiness, surprise, and neutral). The recognition rate was 78.70% with the SIAT-3DFE database. The present study suggested that 3D point cloud could be directly processed for facial expression recognition by using geometric deep learning approach. In perspectives, the developed model will be applied for facial palsy patients to guide and optimize the functional rehabilitation program. Graphical abstract