Transfer Learning Technique with EfficientNet for Facial Expression Recognition System

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems are helpful in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, social marketing, targeted advertising, the music industry, school counseling systems, and detection in the police sector. In this research, using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) architecture, specifically from the EfficientNet family (EfficientNet-B0, Efficient-Net-B01, EfficientNet-B02, EfficientNet-B03, EfficientNet-B04, EfficientNet-B05, EfficientNet-B06, and EfficientNet-B07) has previously gone through a combined scaling process of combined dept, width and resolution. First, the previously frozen sublayer EfficientNet model was used for feature extraction. Next, the layer closer to the output layer is melted by several layers to be retrained in order to recognize the pattern of the CK+ and JAFFE data sets. This process is called the transfer learning technique. This technique is very powerful for working on relatively small data sets, namely CK+ and JAFFE. The main of this research is to improve the accuracy and performance of facial expression recognition models with a transfer learning approach using EfficientNet pre-trained with fine-tuning strategy. Our proposed method, specifically using the EfficientNet-B0 architecture, achieves superior performance for each of the CK+ and JAFFE datasets, achieving 99.57% and 100% accuracy in the test set respectively.