Hybrid Transfer Learning Approach for Emotion Analysis of Occluded Facial Expressions

The ability to recognise and interpret emotional expressions is crucial since emotions play a significant role in our daily lives. Emotions are multifaceted phenomena that affect our behavior, perception, and cognition. As a result, numerous machine-learning and deep-learning algorithms for emotion analysis have been studied in previous works. Finding emotion in an obscured face, such as one covered by a scarf or hidden in shadow, is considerably harder than in a complete face, though. This study explores the effectiveness of deep learning models in occluded facial emotion analysis through a transfer learning approach. The performance of two individual pre-trained models, MobileNetV2 and EfficientNetB3, is compared alongside a hybrid model that combines both approaches. This comparison is conducted using the FER-2013 dataset. The dataset consists of 35,887 images and categorizes emotions into seven emotional categories. The results indicate that the hybrid model attained the highest accuracy, with a score of 93.04% for faces occluded at the top and 92.63% for faces occluded at the bottom. Additionally, the study suggests that top-occluded faces displayed more pronounced emotional expressions in comparison to bottom-occluded faces. Overall, these findings imply that hybrid architecture, which was developed as a state-of-the-art model in the study, proves to be effective for analyzing emotions in facial expressions that are partially obscured.