Deep Feature Selection for Facial Emotion Recognition Based on BPSO and SVM

Facial expressions, which are important social communication tools in our daily life, provide important information about the mental state of people. Research is being done to obtain this information accurately. The importance of these researchs in the field of human-computer interaction is increasing. Many methods have been used for the recognition of universal facial expressions such as neutral, happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear by intelligent systems with high accuracy. Emotion recognition is an example of difficult classification due to factors such as ambient light, age, race, gender, and facial position. In this article, a 3-stage system is proposed for emotion detection from facial images. In the first stage, the CNN-based network is trained with the Fer+ dataset. The Binary Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is applied for feature selection to the feature vector in the fully connected layer of the CNN network trained in the second stage. Selected features are classified by Support Vector Machine. The performance of the proposed system has been tested with the Fer+ dataset. As a result of the test, 85.74% accuracy was measured. The results show that the combination of BPSO and SVM contributes to the classification accuracy and speed of the FER+ dataset.