A Unified Framework of Deep Learning-Based Facial Expression Recognition System for Diversified Applications
Sanoar Hossain, Saiyed Umer, Vijayan K. Asari, Ranjeet Kumar Rout
Abstract
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.