Optimizing Facial Expression Recognition through Effective Preprocessing Techniques

Analyzing human facial expressions using machine vision systems is indeed a challenging yet fascinating problem in the field of computer vision and artificial intelligence. Facial expressions are a primary means through which humans convey emotions, making their automated recognition valuable for various applications including man-computer interaction, affective computing, and psychological research. Pre-processing techniques are applied to every image with the aim of standardizing the images. Frequently used techniques include scaling, blurring, rotating, altering the contour of the image, changing the color to grayscale and normalization. Followed by feature extraction and then the traditional classifiers are applied to infer facial expressions. Increasing the performance of the system is difficult in the typical machine learning approach because feature extraction and classification phases are separate. But in Deep Neural Networks (DNN), the two phases are combined into a single phase. Therefore, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models give better accuracy in Facial Expression Recognition than the traditional classifiers. But still the performance of CNN is hampered by noisy and deviated images in the dataset. This work utilized the preprocessing methods such as resizing, gray-scale conversion and normalization. Also, this research work is motivated by these drawbacks to study the use of image pre-processing techniques to enhance the performance of deep learning methods to implement facial expression recognition. Also, this research aims to recognize emotions using deep learning and show the influences of data pre-processing for further processing of images. The accuracy of each pre-processing methods is compared, then combination between them is analysed and the appropriate preprocessing techniques are identified and implemented to see the variability of accuracies in predicting facial expressions.