Efficient Facial Expression Recognition Network Based on Spot-Adaptive Knowledge Distillation

Facial expression recognition plays a key role in promoting the development of comprehensive intelligence and building friendly human-computer interaction. Due to the interference of feature noise in expression data, the lightweight facial expression recognition model with fewer parameters is difficult to learn more expression features through simple training, which limits the improvement of its recognition performance. An efficient facial expression recognition network based on Spot-adaptive Knowledge Distillation is proposed in this paper. Inspired by VoVNetV2, the network designed in this paper is lightweightly improved using Depthwise Separable Convolution and the parameter-free SimAM attention mechanism, reducing the number of parameters to 0.21 M. To further improve the recognition accuracy of the model, Spot-adaptive Knowledge Distillation is employed to improve the characterization ability of the model. The recognition accuracies of the student network designed in this paper on the KDEF and RAF-DB datasets are 93.05% and 81.17% respectively after spot-adaptive distillation.