Facial Expression Classification Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

In this paper, we propose facial expression recognition using CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), one of the deep learning technologies. The proposed structure has general classification performance for any environment or subject. For this purpose, we collect a variety of databases and organize the database into six expression classes such as 'expressionless', 'happy', 'sad', 'angry', 'surprised' and 'disgusted'. Pre-processing and data augmentation techniques are applied to improve training efficiency and classification performance. In the existing CNN structure, the optimal structure that best expresses the features of six facial expressions is found by adjusting the number of feature maps of the convolutional layer and the number of nodes of fully-connected layer. The experimental results show good classification performance compared to the state-of-the-arts in experiments of the cross validation and the cross database. Also, compared to other conventional models, it is confirmed that the proposed structure is superior in classification performance with less execution time.