Analysis of Gender Differences in Facial Expression Recognition Based on Deep Learning Using Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Potential uses of automated Facial Expression Recognition (FER) cover a wide range of applications such as customer behavior analysis, healthcare applications or providing personalized services. Data for machine learning play a fundamental role, therefore, understanding the relevancy of the data in the outcomes is of utmost importance. In this work we present a study on how gender influences the learning of a FER system. We analyze with Explainable Artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques how gender contributes to the learning and assess which facial expressions are more similar regarding face regions that impact on the classification. Results show that there exist common regions in some expressions both for females and males with different intensities (e.g. happiness); however, there are other expressions like disgust, where important face regions differ. The insights of this work will help improving FER systems and understand the source of any inequality.