A Cascade Attention Based Facial Expression Recognition Network by Fusing Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal Features

The performance of a facial expression recognition network degrades obviously under situations of uneven illumination or partial occluded face as it is quite difficult to pinpoint the attention hotspots on the dynamically changing regions (e.g., eyes, nose, and mouth) as precisely as possible. To address the above issue, by a hybrid of the attention mechanism and pyramid feature, this paper proposes a cascade attention-based facial expression recognition network on the basis of a combination of (i) local spatial feature, (ii) multi-scale-stereoscopic spatial context feature (extracted from the 3-scale pyramid feature), and (iii) temporal feature. Experiments on the CK+, Oulu-CASIA, and RAF-DB datasets obtained recognition accuracy rates of 99.23%, 89.29%, and 86.80%, respectively. It demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both the experimental and natural environment.