REPRESENTATION BOUND FOR HUMAN FACIAL MIMIC WITH THE AID OF PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS

In this paper, we examine how much information is needed to represent the facial mimic, based on Paul Ekman's assumption that the facial mimic can be represented with a few basic emotions. Principal component analysis is used to compact the important facial expressions. Theoretical bounds for facial mimic representation are presented both for using a certain number of principal components and a certain number of bits. When 10 principal components are used to reconstruct color image video at a resolution of 240 × 176 pixels the representation bound is on average 36.8 dB, measured in peak signal-to-noise ratio. Practical confirmation of the theoretical bounds is demonstrated. Quantization of projection coefficients affects the representation, but a quantization with approximately 7-8 bits is found to match an exact representation, measured in mean square error.