Facial Emotion Recognition Using Conventional Machine Learning and Deep Learning Methods: Current Achievements, Analysis and Remaining Challenges

Abstract

Facial emotion recognition (FER) is an emerging and significant research area in the pattern recognition domain. In daily life, the role of non-verbal communication is significant, and in overall communication, its involvement is around 55% to 93%. Facial emotion analysis is efficiently used in surveillance videos, expression analysis, gesture recognition, smart homes, computer games, depression treatment, patient monitoring, anxiety, detecting lies, psychoanalysis, paralinguistic communication, detecting operator fatigue and robotics. In this paper, we present a detailed review on FER. The literature is collected from different reputable research published during the current decade. This review is based on conventional machine learning (ML) and various deep learning (DL) approaches. Further, different FER datasets for evaluation metrics that are publicly available are discussed and compared with benchmark results. This paper provides a holistic review of FER using traditional ML and DL methods to highlight the future gap in this domain for new researchers. Finally, this review work is a guidebook and very helpful for young researchers in the FER area, providing a general understating and basic knowledge of the current state-of-the-art methods, and to experienced researchers looking for productive directions for future work.