US Patent 9105119 Anonymization of facial expressions

A method facilitates training of an automatic facial expression recognition system through distributed anonymization of facial images, thereby allowing people to submit their own facial images without divulging their identities. Original facial images are accessed and perturbed to generate synthesized facial images. Personal identities contained in the original facial images are no longer discernable from the synthesized facial images. At the same time, each synthesized facial image preserves at least part of the emotional expression contained in the corresponding original facial image.