Facial Expression Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

Emotions are a powerful tool in communication and one way that humans show their emotions is through their facial expressions. One of the challenging and powerful tasks in social communications is facial expression recognition, as in non-verbal communication, facial expressions are key. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is an active research area, with several recent studies using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In this paper, we demonstrate the classification of FER based on static images, using CNNs, without requiring any pre-processing or feature extraction tasks. The paper also illustrates techniques to improve future accuracy in this area by using preprocessing, which includes face detection and illumination correction. Feature extraction is used to extract the most prominent parts of the face, including the jaw, mouth, eyes, nose, and eyebrows. Furthermore, we also discuss the literature review and present our CNN architecture, and the challenges of using max-pooling and dropout, which eventually aided in better performance. We obtained a test accuracy of 61.7% on FER2013 in a seven-classes classification task compared to 75.2% in state-of-the-art classification.