Facial Expression Recognition Using Multi-Block Deep CNN

Emotions play a crucial role in decision-making, moral judgments, and other cognitive processes. The goal of this work is to identify people's facial emotions from face images. Facial expression recognition (FER), a highly diverse field with many commonalities between classes, is a challenging problem. The capabilities of current FER systems are limited in this regard. In this work, a multi-block Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) model was proposed to identify facial expressions. Five blocks with different computational components were defined in a multi-block DCNN to extract the unique characteristics from input images. The second model (DCNN-SVM) is developed with an ensemble of SVM classifier to improve predictability and stability. The third model (DCNN-MV) is based on the majority voting with 4 classifiers SVM, KNN, Random Forest, and Decision Tree. The CK+ dataset was utilized and expanded via image data augmentation to enhance model performance and generalization. By adjusting hyperparameters, the suggested DCNN model's accuracy was investigated. The DCNN model reports an accuracy score of 97.71%. Both DCNN-SVM and DCNN-MV models achieved 97.79% accuracy. On the CK+ dataset, the proposed models demonstrated good accuracy in identifying facial expressions. When compared to existing models, the proposed model outperformed existing models in terms of accuracy.