Facial Expression Recognition Based on Attention Mechanism

At present, traditional facial expression recognition methods of convolutional neural networks are based on local ideas for feature expression, which results in the model’s low efficiency in capturing the dependence between long-range pixels, leading to poor performance for facial expression recognition. In order to solve the above problems, this paper combines a self-attention mechanism with a residual network and proposes a new facial expression recognition model based on the global operation idea. This paper first introduces the self-attention mechanism on the basis of the residual network and finds the relative importance of a location by calculating the weighted average of all location pixels, then introduces channel attention to learn different features on the channel domain, and generates channel attention to focus on the interactive features in different channels so that the robustness can be improved; finally, it merges the self-attention mechanism and the channel attention mechanism to increase the model’s ability to extract globally important features. The accuracy of this paper on the CK+ and FER2013 datasets is 97.89% and 74.15%, respectively, which fully confirmed the effectiveness and superiority of the model in extracting global features.