Facial Expression Emotion Detection for Real-Time Embedded Systems

• Published in: Technologies (Basel) Vol. 6; no. 1; p. 17
• Main Authors: Turabzadeh, Saeed, Meng, Hongying, Swash, Rafiq, Pleva, Matus, Juhar, Jozef
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-01-2018
• Subjects: artificial intelligence; Embedded systems; Emotion recognition; Face recognition; facial expression analysis; Field programmable gate arrays; FPGA; Frames (data processing); Graphical user interface; Labels; Matlab; Model testing; Real time; real-time implementation
• ISSN: 2227-7080; 2227-7080
• DOI: 10.3390/technologies6010017

Recently, real-time facial expression recognition has attracted more and more research. In this study, an automatic facial expression real-time system was built and tested. Firstly, the system and model were designed and tested on a MATLAB environment followed by a MATLAB Simulink environment that is capable of recognizing continuous facial expressions in real-time with a rate of 1 frame per second and that is implemented on a desktop PC. They have been evaluated in a public dataset, and the experimental results were promising. The dataset and labels used in this study were made from videos, which were recorded twice from five participants while watching a video. Secondly, in order to implement in real-time at a faster frame rate, the facial expression recognition system was built on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The camera sensor used in this work was a Digilent VmodCAM - stereo camera module. The model was built on the Atlys™ Spartan-6 FPGA development board. It can continuously perform emotional state recognition in real-time at a frame rate of 30. A graphical user interface was designed to display the participant’s video in real-time and two-dimensional predict labels of the emotion at the same time.