The Timing of Facial Motion in Posed and Spontaneous Smiles

Almost all work in automatic facial expression analysis has focused on recognition of prototypic expressions rather than dynamic changes in appearance over time. To investigate the relative contribution of dynamic features to expression recognition, we used automatic feature tracking to measure the relation between amplitude and duration of smile onsets in spontaneous and deliberate smiles of 81 young adults of Euro- and African-American background. Spontaneous smiles were of smaller amplitude and had a larger and more consistent relation between amplitude and duration than deliberate smiles. A linear discriminant classifier using timing and amplitude measures of smile onsets achieved a 93% recognition rate. Using timing measures alone, recognition rate declined only marginally to 89%. These findings suggest that by extracting and representing dynamic as well as morphological features, automatic facial expression analysis can begin to discriminate among the message values of morphologically similar expressions.