Triple attention feature enhanced pyramid network for facial expression recognition

Abstract

The purpose of facial expression recognition is to capture facial expression features from static pictures or videos and to provide the most intuitive information about human emotion changes for artificial intelligence devices to use effectively for human-computer interaction. Among the factors, the excessive loss of locally valid information and the irreversible degradation trend of the information at different expression semantic scales with increasing network depth are the main challenges faced currently. To address such problems, an enhanced pyramidal network model combining with triple attention mechanisms is designed in this paper. Firstly, three attention mechanism modules, i.e. CBAM, SK, and SE, are embedded into the backbone network model in stages, and the key features are sensed by using spatial or channel information mining, which effectively reduces the effective information loss caused by the network depth. Then, the pyramid network is used as an extension of the backbone network to obtain the semantic information of expression features across scales. The recognition accuracy reaches 96.25% and 73.61% in the CK+ and Fer2013 expression change datasets, respectively. Furthermore, by comparing with other current advanced methods, it is shown that the proposed network architecture combining with the triple attention mechanism and multi-scale cross-information fusion can simultaneously maintain and improve the information mining ability and recognition accuracy of the facial expression recognition model.