Facial Emotion Recognition using Deep Residual Networks in Real-World Environments

Abstract: Automatic affect recognition using visual cues is an important task towards a complete interaction between humans and machines. Applications can be found in tutoring systems and human computer interaction. A critical step towards that direction is facial feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a facial feature extractor model trained on an in-the-wild and massively collected video dataset provided by the RealEyes company. The dataset consists of a million labelled frames and 2,616 thousand subjects. As temporal information is important to the emotion recognition domain, we utilise LSTM cells to capture the temporal dynamics in the data. To show the favourable properties of our pre-trained model on modelling facial affect, we use the RECOLA database, and compare with the current state-of-the-art approach. Our model provides the best results in terms of concordance correlation coefficient.