Unconstrained Facial Expression Recognition Based on Feature Enhanced CNN and Cross-Layer LSTM

LSTM network have shown to outperform in facial expression recognition of video sequence. In view of limited representation ability of single-layer LSTM, a hierarchical attention model with enhanced feature branch is proposed. This new network architecture consists of traditional VGG-16-FACE with enhanced feature branch followed by a crosslayer LSTM. The VGG-16-FACE with enhanced branch extracts the spatial features as well as the cross-layer LSTM extracts the temporal relations between different frames in the video. The proposed method is evaluated on the public emotion databases in subject-independent and cross-database tasks and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.