AUTHOR=Chen Yuekun , Liu Shuaishi , Zhao Dongxu , Ji Wenkai 

TITLE=Occlusion facial expression recognition based on feature fusion residual attention network

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neurorobotics

VOLUME=Volume 17 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurorobotics/articles/10.3389/fnbot.2023.1250706

DOI=10.3389/fnbot.2023.1250706

ISSN=1662-5218

ABSTRACT=Recognizing occluded facial expressions in the wild poses a significant challenge. However, most previous approaches rely solely on either global or local feature-based methods, leading to the loss of relevant expression features. To address these issues, a feature fusion residual attention network (FFRA-Net) is proposed. FFRA-Net consists of a multi-scale module, a local attention module, and a feature fusion module. The multi-scale module divides the intermediate feature map into several sub-feature maps in an equal manner along the channel dimension. Then, a convolution operation is applied to each of these feature maps to obtain diverse global features. The local attention module divides the intermediate feature map into several sub-feature maps along the spatial dimension. Subsequently, a convolution operation is applied to each of these feature maps, resulting in the extraction of local key features through the attention mechanism. The feature fusion module plays a crucial role in integrating global and local expression features, while also establishing residual links between inputs and outputs to compensate for the loss of fine-grained features. Last, two occlusion expression datasets (FM RAF-DB and SG RAF-DB) were constructed based on the RAF-DB dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed FFRA-Net achieves excellent results on four datasets: FM RAF-DB, SG RAF-DB,