Memristive patch attention neural network for facial expression recognition and edge computing

Facial expression recognition has made a significant progress as a result of the advent of more and more convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, with the improvement of CNN, the models continues to get deeper and larger so as to a greater focus on the high-level features of the image and the low-level features tend to be lost. Because of the reason above, the dependence of low-level features between different areas of the face often cannot be summarized. In response to this problem, we propose a novel network based on the CNN model. To extract long-range dependencies of low-level features, multiple attention mechanisms has been introduced into the network. In this paper, the patch attention mechanism is designed to obtain the dependence between low-level features of facial expressions firstly. After fusion, the feature maps are input to the backbone network incorporating convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to enhance the feature extraction ability and improve the accuracy of facial expression recognition, and achieve competitive results on three datasets CK+ (98.10%), JAFFE (95.12%) and FER2013 (73.50%). Further, according to the PA Net designed in this paper, a hardware friendly implementation scheme is designed based on memristor crossbars, which is expected to provide a software and hardware co-design scheme for edge computing of personal and wearable electronic products.