Incremental Clustering-Based Facial Feature Tracking Using Bayesian ART

摘要

Person-independent, emotion specific facial feature tracking have been of interest in the machine vision society for decades. Among various methods, the constrained local model (CLM) has shown significant results in person-independent feature tracking. In 63this paper, we propose an automatic, efficient, and robust method for emotion specific facial feature detection and tracking from image sequences. Considering a 17-point feature model on the frontal face region, the proposed tracking framework incorporates CLM with two incremental clustering algorithms to increase robustness and minimize tracking error during feature tracking. The Patch Clustering algorithm is applied to build an appearance model of face frames by organizing previously encountered similar patches into clusters while the shape Clustering algorithm is applied to build a structure model of face shapes by organizing previously encountered similar shapes into clusters followed by Bayesian adaptive resonance theory (ART). Both models are used to explore the similar features/shapes in the successive images. The clusters in each model are built and updated incrementally and online, controlled by amount of facial muscle movement. The overall performance of the proposed incremental clustering-based facial feature tracking (ICFFT) is evaluated using the FGnet database and the extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) database. ICFFT demonstrates better results than baseline-method CLM and provides robust tracking as well as improved localization accuracy of emotion specific facial features tracking.