  This paper investigates the feasibility of using the periocular region for
expression recognition. Most works have tried to solve this by analyzing the
whole face. Periocular is the facial region in the immediate vicinity of the
eye. It has the advantage of being available over a wide range of distances and
under partial face occlusion, thus making it suitable for unconstrained or
uncooperative scenarios. We evaluate five different image descriptors on a
dataset of 1,574 images from 118 subjects. The experimental results show an
average/overall accuracy of 67.0%/78.0% by fusion of several descriptors. While
this accuracy is still behind that attained with full-face methods, it is
noteworthy to mention that our initial approach employs only one frame to
predict the expression, in contraposition to state of the art, exploiting
several order more data comprising spatial-temporal data which is often not
available.
