Synthetic Data Generation for Emotional Depth Faces: Optimizing Conditional DCGANs via Genetic Algorithms in the Latent Space and Stabilizing Training with Knowledge Distillation

Affective computing faces a major challenge: the lack of high-quality, diverse depth facial datasets for recognizing subtle emotional expressions. We propose a framework for synthetic depth face generation using an optimized GAN with Knowledge Distillation (EMA teacher models) to stabilize training, improve quality, and prevent mode collapse. We also apply Genetic Algorithms to evolve GAN latent vectors based on image statistics, boosting diversity and visual quality for target emotions. The approach outperforms GAN, VAE, GMM, and KDE in both diversity and quality. For classification, we extract and concatenate LBP, HOG, Sobel edge, and intensity histogram features, achieving 94% and 96% accuracy with XGBoost. Evaluation using FID, IS, SSIM, and PSNR shows consistent improvement over state-of-the-art methods.