Multi-Channel Expression Recognition Network Based on Channel Weighting

Accurate expression interpretation occupies a huge proportion of human-to-human communication. The control of expressions can facilitate more convenient communication between people. Expression recognition technology has also been transformed from relatively mature laboratory-controlled research to natural scenes research. In this paper, we design a multi-channel attention network based on channel weighting for expression analysis in natural scenes. The network mainly consists of three parts: Multi-branch expression recognition feature extraction network, which combines residual network ResNet18 and ConvNeXt network ideas to improve feature extraction and uses adaptive feature fusion to build a complete network; Adaptive Channel Weighting, which designs adaptive weights in the auxiliary network for feature extraction, performs channel weighting, and highlights key information areas; and Attention module, which designs and modifies the spatial attention mechanism and increases the proportion of feature information to accelerate the acquisition of important expression feature information areas. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better recognition efficiency than existing algorithms on the dataset FER2013 under uncontrolled conditions, reaching 73.81%, and also achieves good recognition accuracy of 89.65% and 85.24% on the Oulu_CASIA and RAF-DB datasets, respectively.