Convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm based facial emotion recognition (FER) system for FER-2013 dataset

Facial expression recognition (FER) is the key to understanding human emotions and feelings. It is an active area of research since human thoughts can be collected, processed, and used in customer satisfaction, politics, and medical domains. Automated FER systems had been developed and have been used to recognize humans’ emotions but it has been a quite challenging problem in machine learning due to the high intra-class variation. The first models were using known methods such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), Bayes classifier, Fuzzy Techniques, Feature Selection, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) in their models but still, some limitations affect the accuracy critically such as subjectivity, occlusion, pose, low resolution, scale, illumination variation, etc. The ability of CNN boosts FER accuracy. Deep learning algorithms have emerged as the greatest way to produce the best results in FER in recent years. Various datasets were used to train, test, and validate the models. FER2013, CK+, JAFFE and FERG are some of the most popular datasets. To improve the accuracy of FER models, one dataset or a mix of datasets has been employed. Every dataset includes limitations and issues that have an impact on the model that is trained for it. As a solution to this problem, our state-of-the-art model based on deep learning architectures, particularly convolutional neural network architectures (CNN) with supportive techniques has been implemented. The proposed model achieved 93.7% accuracy with the combination of FER2013 and CK+ datasets for FER2013.