A Hybrid Vision Transformer and EfficientNet-B3 Framework for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression recognition technology is vital for security, verification, and personalization, but it faces challenges due to variations in scale, illumination, occlusion, and facial expressions. This paper presents a hybrid architecture that combines Vision Transformers (ViTs) to capture global context with EfficientNet-B3 for multi-scale feature extraction. Unlike simple concatenation, our approach projects the ViT's [CLS] token and the EfficientNet's global pooling features into a shared 512-dimensional space before merging, enabling better alignment of global and local features. When tested on the FERPlus dataset, it reaches an accuracy of 94.4 ± 0.3%, surpassing several recent methods, notably existing transformer- and CNN-based methods. Ablation studies show each component's contribution, with the full model outperforming the no-fusion version by 2.6%. With around 98 million parameters and an inference time of ~23 ms per image, it balances efficiency and high performance, suitable for real-time use on suitable hardware. Evaluation via confusion matrix, t-SNE visualization, and comparisons with recent techniques such as HLA-ViT (90.13%), AU-ViT (90.15%), and CCFER (91.24%) demonstrates its robustness and discriminative feature learning. This work highlights the promise of hybrid deep learning architectures in tackling real-world facial expression recognition challenges.