Facial Expression Recognition: A Survey

Abstract

Facial Expression Recognition (FER), as the primary processing method for non-verbal intentions, is an important and promising field of computer vision and artificial intelligence, and one of the subject areas of symmetry. This survey is a comprehensive and structured overview of recent advances in FER. We first categorise the existing FER methods into two main groups, i.e., conventional approaches and deep learning-based approaches. Methodologically, to highlight the differences and similarities, we propose a general framework of a conventional FER approach and review the possible technologies that can be employed in each component. As for deep learning-based methods, four kinds of neural network-based state-of-the-art FER approaches are presented and analysed. Besides, we introduce seventeen commonly used FER datasets and summarise four FER-related elements of datasets that may influence the choosing and processing of FER approaches. Evaluation methods and metrics are given in the later part to show how to assess FER algorithms, along with subsequent performance comparisons of different FER approaches on the benchmark datasets. At the end of the survey, we present some challenges and opportunities that need to be addressed in future.