Mixup Data Augmentation and Channel-Spatial Attention Mechanisms for Facial Emotion Recognition

With the rapid advancement of computer vision, facial expression recognition has made significant progress in areas like human-computer interaction, mental health, driver assistance, and education. However, traditional facial expression recognition techniques exhibit poor robustness under complex backgrounds and varying lighting conditions, making them susceptible to environmental noise and challenging to accurately capture and classify complex emotional states. Additionally, these techniques often lack in data augmentation and model generalization capabilities, leading to overfitting on training samples and insufficient recognition of unseen samples. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel convolutional neural network model—HSCNet (A Hybrid Data Augmentation and Channel-Spatial Attention Mechanisms Neural Network). The HSCNet model first employs the Mixup data augmentation technique to generate new training samples, then utilizes the Res2Net50 backbone network combined with the CBAM attention mechanism and average-max pooling techniques to extract significant features while suppressing redundant ones. This approach not only enhances feature extraction accuracy but also significantly improves the model’s generalization ability and robustness in facial expression recognition tasks. Finally, tested on the public dataset FERPlus, which includes eight types of emotions, the HSCNet model achieved an accuracy rate of 89.72%, demonstrating excellent performance and robustness.