Understanding How CNNs Recognize Facial Expressions: A Case Study with LIME and CEM

Recognizing facial expressions has been a persistent goal in the scientific community. Since the rise of artificial intelligence, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have become popular to recognize facial expressions, as images can be directly used as input. Current CNN models can achieve high recognition rates, but they give no clue about their reasoning process. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has been developed as a means to help to interpret the results obtained by machine learning models. When dealing with images, one of the most-used XAI techniques is LIME. LIME highlights the areas of the image that contribute to a classification. As an alternative to LIME, the CEM method appeared, providing explanations in a way that is natural for human classification: besides highlighting what is sufficient to justify a classification, it also identifies what should be absent to maintain it and to distinguish it from another classification. This study presents the results of comparing LIME and CEM applied over complex images such as facial expression images. While CEM could be used to explain the results on images described with a reduced number of features, LIME would be the method of choice when dealing with images described with a huge number of features.