Building a Database with Thermal Images for the Classification of Emotional States

This research paper aims primarily to highlight the stages regarding the development of a database with facial images in the thermal spectrum, presenting various emotional states (for example, neutral, happy and sad). A series of exploratory results was presented, carried out on five databases with thermal images (DBold-2019, DBnew-2023, DBnew-2023_Crop, DBnew- 2023_Noise and DBnew-2023_ROI), belonging to the CCETIC research center (CCETIC, 2023). The database development process includes both the thermal image acquisition part and the pre-processing steps (cutting, alignment, selection of areas of interest, removal of annotations/marking elements, etc). And secondly, it aims to present an analysis regarding the general structure of the thermal image processing application, together with a series of image processing methods and techniques, addressed in certain research works. Some experimental results obtained with the help of the five databases are presented, as well as a series of general conclusions regarding the development of a database with facial thermal images.