Frontalization and adaptive exponential ensemble rule for deep-learning-based facial expression recognition system

Automatic facial expression recognition (FER) is an important technique in human–computer interfaces and surveillance systems. It classifies the input facial image into one of the basic expressions (anger, sadness, surprise, happiness, disgust, fear, and neutral). There are two types of FER algorithms: feature-based and convolutional neural network (CNN)-based algorithms. The CNN is a powerful classifier, however, without proper auxiliary techniques, its performance may be limited. In this study, we improve the CNN-based FER system by utilizing face frontalization and the hierarchical architecture. The frontalization algorithm aligns the face by in-plane or out-of-plane, rotation, landmark point matching, and removing background noise. The proposed adaptive exponentially weighted average ensemble rule can determine the optimal weight according to the accuracy of classifiers to improve robustness. Experiments on several popular databases are performed and the results show that the proposed system has a very high accuracy and outperforms state-of-the-art FER systems.