Local Dominant Directional Symmetrical Coding Patterns for Facial Expression Recognition

To overcome the shortcomings of inaccurate textural direction representation and high-computational complexity of Local Binary Patterns (LBPs), we propose a novel feature descriptor named as Local Dominant Directional Symmetrical Coding Patterns (LDDSCPs). Inspired by the directional sensitivity of human visual system, we partition eight convolution masks into two symmetrical groups according to their directions and adopt these two groups to compute the convolution values of each pixel. Then, we encode the dominant direction information of facial expression texture by comparing each pixel's convolution values with the average strength of its belonging group and obtain LDDSCP-1 and LDDSCP-2 codes, respectively. At last, in view of the symmetry of two groups of direction masks, we stack these corresponding histograms of LDDSCP-1 and LDDSCP-2 codes into the ultimate LDDSCP feature vector which has effects on the more precise facial feature description and the lower computational complexity. Experimental results on the JAFFE and Cohn-Kanade databases demonstrate that the proposed LDDSCP feature descriptor compared with LBP, Gabor, and other traditional operators achieves superior performance in recognition rate and computational complexity. Furthermore, it is also no less inferior to some state-of-the-art local descriptors like as LDP, LDNP, es-LBP, and GDP.