Submotions for hidden Markov model based dynamic facial action recognition

Video based analysis of a persons' mood or behavior is in general performed by interpreting various features observed on the body. Facial actions, such as speaking, yawning or laughing are considered as key features. Dynamic changes within the face can be modeled with the well known Hidden Markov Models (HMM). Unfortunately even within one class examples can show a high variance because of unknown start and end state or the length of a facial action. In this work we therefore perform a decomposition of those into so called submotions. These can be robustly recognized with HMMs, applying selected points in the face and their geometrical distances. Additionally the first and second derivation of the distances is included. A sequence of submotions is then interpreted with a dictionary and dynamic programming, as the order may be crucial. Analyzing the frequency of sequences shows the relevance of the submotions order. In an experimental section we show, that our novel submotion approach outperforms a standard HMM with the same set of features by nearly 30% absolute recognition rate.