Facial Emotion Recognition with Deep Neural Network: A Study of Visual Geometry Group-16 (VGG16) Technique with Data Augmentation for Improved Precision

Abstract

Emotions play a significant role in both verbal and nonverbal communication. Facial emotion recognition has applications in various sectors where we can get real-time feedback about student activeness by detecting their expression. In this paper, we aim to provide an improved deep-learning technique to detect emotions by using publicly available datasets to perform this detection. To get more data for the well-being of the Machine Learning Model, we have used data augmentation using the TensorFlow framework. Visual Geometry Group-16 (VGG16) is a convolutional neural network of 16 layers deep. There has been an alteration to the default VGG16 structure to get better classification results. Various optimization algorithms and loss functions increase the model’s accuracy. We have used many evaluation parameters from the technical side, like precision, accuracy, recall, Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC), and F1 Score. The proposed model has an accuracy of 89% while having a precision of 81 percent for classification. We have achieved an F1 Score of 0.42 and an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.734. Overall, it would be beneficial for analyzing and categorizing positive and negative emotions, which would aid in detecting signs of stress, anxiety, and burnout, as well as taking preventive actions to enhance well-being.