Facial Emotion Recognition using YOLO based Deep Learning Classifier

Understanding facial expressions is key to successful communication. It's like decoding a secret language that helps us know if someone is happy, sad, angry, surprised, or something else altogether. Harnessing facial emotion recognition (FER) in machines holds the potential to revolutionize human-computer interaction, improve customer service experiences and provide invaluable support in medical diagnosis. Machines can comprehend human's needs more effectively by reading the emotions from their facial expression and therefore this results in a more natural conversation between them and the machine. Various machine and deep learning methodologies have been implemented for FER. In this research work, the authors propose the state-of-the-art YOLO (You Only Look Once) based deep learning classifier for FER. The YOLO algorithm is a single-shot approach that efficiently classifies objects in a single pass. It achieves this by using a single neural network to predict bounding boxes and target class probabilities by utilizing the entire image as input. YOLOv8 is a recent iteration of the YOLO object detection algorithm is popular for its speed and accuracy which offers improvements over prior versions, making it a suitable choice for real-time intended task of FER. With the proposed classifier, the authors achieved test accuracy of 72.56% on the FER-2013 dataset in a seven-class FER task.