Emotion Recognition Using Facial Expression Images for a Robotic Companion

Social robots are gradually becoming part of society. However, social robots lack the ability to adequately interact with users in a natural manner and are in need of more human-like abilities. In this paper we present experimental results on emotion recognition through the use of facial expression images obtained from the KDEF database, a fundamental first step towards the development of an empathic social robot. We compare the performance of Support Vector Machines (SVM) and a Multilayer Perceptron Network (MLP) on facial expression classification. We employ Gabor filters as an image pre-processing step before classification. Our SVM model achieves an accuracy rate of 97.08 %, whereas our MLP achieves 93.5 %. These experiments serve as benchmark for our current research project in the area of social robotics.