Multilabel convolution neural network for facial expression recognition and ordinal intensity estimation

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) has gained considerable attention in affective computing due to its vast area of applications. Diverse approaches and methods have been considered for a robust FER in the field, but only a few works considered the intensity of emotion embedded in the expression. Even the available studies on expression intensity estimation successfully assigned a nominal/regression value or classified emotion in a range of intervals. Most of the available works on facial expression intensity estimation successfully present only the emotion intensity estimation. At the same time, others proposed methods that predict emotion and its intensity in different channels. These multiclass approaches and extensions do not conform to man heuristic manner of recognising emotion and its intensity estimation. This work presents a Multilabel Convolution Neural Network (ML-CNN)-based model, which could simultaneously recognise emotion and provide ordinal metrics as the intensity estimation of the emotion. The proposed ML-CNN is enhanced with the aggregation of Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss and Island Loss (IL) functions to minimise intraclass and interclass variations. Also, ML-CNN model is pre-trained with Visual Geometric Group (VGG-16) to control overfitting. In the experiments conducted on Binghampton University 3D Facial Expression (BU-3DFE) and Cohn Kanade extension (CK+) datasets, we evaluate ML-CNN’s performance based on accuracy and loss. We also carried out a comparative study of our model with some popularly used multilabel algorithms using standard multilabel metrics. ML-CNN model simultaneously predicts emotion and intensity estimation using ordinal metrics. The model also shows appreciable and superior performance over four standard multilabel algorithms: Chain Classifier (CC), distinct Random K label set (RAKEL), Multilabel K Nearest Neighbour (MLKNN) and Multilabel ARAM (MLARAM).