Pre-Trained Convolutional Neural Network Features for Facial Expression Recognition

Abstract: Facial expression recognition has been an active area in computer vision with application areas including animation, social robots, personalized banking, etc. In this study, we explore the problem of image classification for detecting facial expressions based on features extracted from pre-trained convolutional neural networks trained on ImageNet database. Features are extracted and transferred to a Linear Support Vector Machine for classification. All experiments are performed on two publicly available datasets such as JAFFE and CK+ database. The results show that representations learned from pre-trained networks for a task such as object recognition can be transferred, and used for facial expression recognition. Furthermore, for a small dataset, using features from earlier layers of the VGG19 network provides better classification accuracy. Accuracies of 92.26% and 92.86% were achieved for the CK+ and JAFFE datasets respectively.