Cross-Task Multi-Branch Vision Transformer for Facial Expression and Mask Wearing Classification

Abstract: With wearing masks becoming a new cultural norm, facial expression recognition (FER) while taking masks into account has become a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a unified multi-branch vision transformer for facial expression recognition and mask wearing classification tasks. Our approach extracts shared features for both tasks using a dual-branch architecture that obtains multi-scale feature representations. Furthermore, we propose a cross-task fusion phase that processes tokens for each task with separate branches, while exchanging information using a cross attention module. Our proposed framework reduces the overall complexity compared with using separate networks for both tasks by the simple yet effective cross-task fusion phase. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model performs better than or on par with different state-of-the-art methods on both facial expression recognition and facial mask wearing classification task.