Facial Expression Image Dataset for Computer Vision Algorithms

The dataset for this project is characterised by photos of individual human emotion expression and these photos are taken with the help of both digital camera and a mobile phone camera from different angles, posture, background, light exposure, and distances. This task might look and sound very easy but there were some challenges encountered along the process which are reviewed below:

1) People constraint

One of the major challenges faced during this project is getting people to participate in the image capturing process as school was on vacation, and other individuals gotten around the environment were not willing to let their images be captured for personal and security reasons even after explaining the notion behind the project which is mainly for academic research purposes. Due to this challenge, we resorted to capturing the images of the researcher and just a few other willing individuals.

2) Time constraint

As with all deep learning projects, the more data available the more accuracy and less error the result will produce. At the initial stage of the project, it was agreed to have 10 emotional expression photos each of at least 50 persons and we can increase the number of photos for more accurate results but due to the constraint in time of this project an agreement was later made to just capture the researcher and a few other people that are willing and available. These photos were taken for just two types of human emotion expression that is, “happy” and “sad” faces due to time constraint too. To expand our work further on this project (as future works and recommendations), photos of other facial expression such as anger, contempt, disgust, fright, and surprise can be included if time permits.

3) The approved facial emotions capture.

It was agreed to capture as many angles and posture of just two facial emotions for this project with at least 10 images emotional expression per individual, but due to time and people constraints few persons were captured with as many postures as possible for this project which is stated below:

Ø Happy faces: 65 images

Ø Sad faces: 62 images

There are many other types of facial emotions and again to expand our project in the future, we can include all the other types of the facial emotions if time permits, and people are readily available.

4) Expand Further.

This project can be improved furthermore with so many abilities, again due to the limitation of time given to this project, these improvements can be implemented later as future works. In simple words, this project is to detect/predict real-time human emotion which involves creating a model that can detect the percentage confidence of any happy or sad facial image. The higher the percentage confidence the more accurate the facial fed into the model.

5) Other Questions

Can the model be reproducible? the supposed response to this question should be YES. If and only if the model will be fed with the proper data (images) such as images of other types of emotional expression.