Modified MobileNetV2 with Convolutional Block Attention Module for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial emotion recognition is one of the artificial intelligence implementations used to recognize emotions based on data learned by computers. Unlike humans, who can recognize a person’s emotions directly, computers need several trainings procedures conducted by humans to be able to recognize a person’s emotions. Previous research has proposed various methods with deep learning and traditional machine learning approaches to classify emotions based on faces. Some studies obtained relatively high accuracy, but on evaluation by cross-validation, the results were much lower than the accuracy obtained. Therefore, this study proposes an approach using a modified MobileNetV2 deep learning architecture in the residual layer by adding a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to improve accuracy and data generalization. This experiment uses the Karolinska Directional Emotional Faces (KDEF) public benchmark dataset. Preprocessing is done with image augmentation to enrich the training data by resizing, center cropping, random horizontal flipping, random affine, and random rotation. The proposed method is evaluated by 5-fold cross-validation and compared with MobileNetV2 without modification and state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperform all comparative methods by achieving a 5 -fold cross-validation accuracy of 94.387%.