The Effects of Facial Expressions on Face Biometric System’s Reliability

The human mood has a temporary effect on the face shape due to the movement of its muscles. Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and other emotional conditions may affect the face biometric system’s reliability. Most of the current studies on facial expressions are concerned about the accuracy of classifying the subjects based on their expressions. This study investigated the effect of facial expressions on the reliability of a face biometric system to find out which facial expression puts the biometric system at greater risk. Moreover, it identified a set of facial features that have the lowest facial deformation caused by facial expressions to be generalized during the recognition process, regardless of which facial expression is presented. In order to achieve the goal of this study, an analysis of 22 facial features between the normal face and six universal facial expressions is obtained. The results show that the face biometric systems are affected by facial expressions where the disgust expression achieved the most dissimilar score, while the sad expression achieved the lowest dissimilar score. Additionally, the study identified the five and top ten facial features that have the lowest facial deformations on the face shape in all facial expressions. Besides that, the relativity score showed less variances between the sample using the top facial features. The obtained results of this study minimized the false rejection rate in the face biometric system and subsequently the ability to raise the system’s acceptance threshold to maximize the intrusion detection rate without affecting the user convenience.