scholarly journals A Unified Framework of Deep Learning-Based Facial Expression Recognition System for Diversified Applications

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (19) ◽  
pp. 9174
Author(s):  
Sanoar Hossain ◽  
Saiyed Umer ◽  
Vijayan Asari ◽  
Ranjeet Kumar Rout

This work proposes a facial expression recognition system for a diversified field of applications. The purpose of the proposed system is to predict the type of expressions in a human face region. The implementation of the proposed method is fragmented into three components. In the first component, from the given input image, a tree-structured part model has been applied that predicts some landmark points on the input image to detect facial regions. The detected face region was normalized to its fixed size and then down-sampled to its varying sizes such that the advantages, due to the effect of multi-resolution images, can be introduced. Then, some convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures were proposed in the second component to analyze the texture patterns in the facial regions. To enhance the proposed CNN model’s performance, some advanced techniques, such data augmentation, progressive image resizing, transfer-learning, and fine-tuning of the parameters, were employed in the third component to extract more distinctive and discriminant features for the proposed facial expression recognition system. The performance of the proposed system, due to different CNN models, is fused to achieve better performance than the existing state-of-the-art methods and for this reason, extensive experimentation has been carried out using the Karolinska-directed emotional faces (KDEF), GENKI-4k, Cohn-Kanade (CK+), and Static Facial Expressions in the Wild (SFEW) benchmark databases. The performance has been compared with some existing methods concerning these databases, which shows that the proposed facial expression recognition system outperforms other competing methods.

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 1087
Author(s):  
Muhammad Naveed Riaz ◽  
Yao Shen ◽  
Muhammad Sohail ◽  
Minyi Guo

Facial expression recognition has been well studied for its great importance in the areas of human–computer interaction and social sciences. With the evolution of deep learning, there have been significant advances in this area that also surpass human-level accuracy. Although these methods have achieved good accuracy, they are still suffering from two constraints (high computational power and memory), which are incredibly critical for small hardware-constrained devices. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture eXnet (Expression Net) based on parallel feature extraction which surpasses current methods in accuracy and contains a much smaller number of parameters (eXnet: 4.57 million, VGG19: 14.72 million), making it more efficient and lightweight for real-time systems. Several modern data augmentation techniques are applied for generalization of eXnet; these techniques improve the accuracy of the network by overcoming the problem of overfitting while containing the same size. We provide an extensive evaluation of our network against key methods on Facial Expression Recognition 2013 (FER-2013), Extended Cohn-Kanade Dataset (CK+), and Real-world Affective Faces Database (RAF-DB) benchmark datasets. We also perform ablation evaluation to show the importance of different components of our architecture. To evaluate the efficiency of eXnet on embedded systems, we deploy it on Raspberry Pi 4B. All these evaluations show the superiority of eXnet for emotion recognition in the wild in terms of accuracy, the number of parameters, and size on disk.


Electronics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 1487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asad Ullah ◽  
Jing Wang ◽  
M. Shahid Anwar ◽  
Usman Ahmad ◽  
Uzair Saeed ◽  
...  

Automatic facial expression recognition is an emerging field. Moreover, the interest has been increased with the transition from laboratory-controlled conditions to in the wild scenarios. Most of the research has been done over nonoccluded faces under the constrained environment, while automatic facial expression is less understood/implemented for partial occlusion in the real world conditions. Apart from that, our research aims to tackle the issues of overfitting (caused by the shortage of adequate training data) and to alleviate the expression-unrelated/intraclass/nonlinear facial variations, such as head pose estimation, eye gaze estimation, intensity and microexpressions. In our research, we control the magnitude of each Action Unit (AU) and combine several of the Action Unit combinations to leverage learning from the generative and discriminative representations for automatic FER. We have also addressed the problem of diversification of expressions from lab controlled to real-world scenarios from our cross-database study and proposed a model for enhancement of the discriminative power of deep features while increasing the interclass scatters, by preserving the locality closeness. Furthermore, facial expression consists of an expressive component as well as neutral component, so we proposed a generative model which is capable of generating neutral expression from an input image using cGAN. The expressive component is filtered and passed to the intermediate layers and the process is called De-expression Residue Learning. The residue in the intermediate/middle layers is very important for learning through expressive components. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our method (DLP-DeRL) through qualitative and quantitative experimental results using four databases. Our method is more accurate and robust, and outperforms all the existing methods (hand crafted features and deep learning) while dealing the images in the wild.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoliang Zhu ◽  
Shihao Ye ◽  
Liang Zhao ◽  
Zhicheng Dai

As a sub-challenge of EmotiW (the Emotion Recognition in the Wild challenge), how to improve performance on the AFEW (Acted Facial Expressions in the wild) dataset is a popular benchmark for emotion recognition tasks with various constraints, including uneven illumination, head deflection, and facial posture. In this paper, we propose a convenient facial expression recognition cascade network comprising spatial feature extraction, hybrid attention, and temporal feature extraction. First, in a video sequence, faces in each frame are detected, and the corresponding face ROI (range of interest) is extracted to obtain the face images. Then, the face images in each frame are aligned based on the position information of the facial feature points in the images. Second, the aligned face images are input to the residual neural network to extract the spatial features of facial expressions corresponding to the face images. The spatial features are input to the hybrid attention module to obtain the fusion features of facial expressions. Finally, the fusion features are input in the gate control loop unit to extract the temporal features of facial expressions. The temporal features are input to the fully connected layer to classify and recognize facial expressions. Experiments using the CK+ (the extended Cohn Kanade), Oulu-CASIA (Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences) and AFEW datasets obtained recognition accuracy rates of 98.46%, 87.31%, and 53.44%, respectively. This demonstrated that the proposed method achieves not only competitive performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods but also greater than 2% performance improvement on the AFEW dataset, proving the significant outperformance of facial expression recognition in the natural environment.


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