Natural Scene Facial Expression Recognition with Dimension Reduction Network

Abstract

As an external manifestation of human emotions, expression recognition plays an important role in human-computer interaction. Although existing expression recognition methods performs perfectly on constrained frontal faces, there are still many challenges in expression recognition in natural scenes due to different unrestricted conditions. Expression classification belongs to a pattern recognition problem where intra-class distance is greater than the inter-class distance, which leads to severe over-fitting when using neural networks for expression recognition. This paper proposes a novel net-work structure called Dimension Reduction Network which can effectively reduce generalization error. By adding a data dimension reduction module before the general classification network, a lot of redundant information is filtered, and only useful information is left. This can reduce the interference by irrelevant information when performing classification tasks and reduce generalization error. The proposed method does not require any modification to the classification network, only a small dimension reduction module needs to be added in front of the classification network. However, it can effectively reduce generalization error. We designed big and tiny versions of Dimension Reduction Network, both exceeds our baseline on AffectNet data set. The big version of our proposed method surpassed the state-of-the-art methods by more than 1.2% on AffectNet data set. Our code will open source3 when the paper is accepted.