Accurate facial expression recognition (FER) requires reliable signal filtering and the effective feature extraction. Considering these requirements, this paper presents a novel approach for FER which is robust to noise. The main contributions of this work are: First, to preserve texture details in facial expression images and remove image noise, we improved the anisotropic diffusion filter by adjusting the diffusion coefficient according to two factors, namely, the gray value difference

more »

... the object and the background and the gradient magnitude of object. The improved filter can effectively distinguish facial muscle deformation and facial noise in face images. Second, to further improve robustness, we propose a new feature descriptor based on a combination of the Histogram of Oriented Gradients with the Canny operator (Canny-HOG) which can represent the precise deformation of eyes, eyebrows and lips for FER. Third, Canny-HOG's block and cell sizes are adjusted to reduce feature dimensionality and make the classifier less prone to overfitting. Our method was tested on images from the JAFFE and CK databases. Experimental results in L-O-Sam-O and L-O-Sub-O modes demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Meanwhile, the recognition rate of this method is not significantly affected in the presence of Gaussian noise and salt-and-pepper noise conditions.