Convolutional Neural Networks for Facial Expression Recognition with Few Training Samples

Facial expression recognition (FER) plays an important role in human-machine interaction. An assistant robot having a close interaction with human being should be able to recognize human facial expression. FER is a non-trivial problem because each individual has his own way to reveal his emotion and the facial expressions of two different persons may not be totally identical. Hence, facial expression recognition is still a challenging problem in computer vision. In this work, we propose a simple solution for facial expression recognition that uses a combination of Convolutional Neural Network and specific image pre-processing steps. The experiments employed to evaluate our technique were carried out using two largely used public databas-es(CK+, JAFFE). A study of the impact of each image pre-processing operation in the accuracy rate is presented. The proposed method: achieves competitive results when compared with other facial expression recognition methods-97.85% of accuracy in the CK+ database-it is fast to train, and it allows for real time facial expression recognition with standard computers.