Facial expression recognition for a seven-class small and medium-sized dataset based on transfer learning CNNs

Abstract

As one of the most common biological information for human to express their emotions, facial expression plays an important role in biological research, psychological analysis and even human-computer interaction in the computer field. It is very important to use the efficient computing and processing power of computers to realize automatic facial expression recognition. However, in the research process of this field, most people's technology and model achievements are based on large datasets, which lack the universality of small and medium-sized datasets. Therefore, this project provides an optimization model on a specific seven-class small and medium face image dataset and provides a possible technical optimization reference direction for facial expression recognition models on similar small and medium-sized datasets. During the experiment, the training performance of VGG16 and MobileNet is compared. A comparative experiment is set up to observe the effect of transfer learning mechanism on training results. The results show that transfer learning has a significant effect on the performance of the model, and the accuracy of the optimal test set is more than 90%. Regardless of whether transfer learning mechanism is used, the training performance of VGG16 model structure is better than that of MobileNet structure in the same dataset.