Facial Expression Recognition: A Review of Trends and Techniques

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is presently the aspect of cognitive and affective computing with the most attention and popularity, aided by its vast application areas. Several studies have been conducted on FER, and many review works are also available. The existing FER review works only give an account of FER models capable of predicting the basic expressions. None of the works considers intensity estimation of an emotion; neither do they include studies that address data annotation inconsistencies and correlation among labels in their works. This work first introduces some identified FER application areas and provides a discussion on recognised FER challenges. We proceed to provide a comprehensive FER review in three different machine learning problem definitions: Single Label Learning (SLL)- which presents FER as a multiclass problem, Multilabel Learning (MLL)- that resolves the ambiguity nature of FER, and Label Distribution Learning- that recovers the distribution of emotion in FER data annotation. We also include studies on expression intensity estimation from the face. Furthermore, popularly employed FER models are thoroughly and carefully discussed in handcrafted, conventional machine learning and deep learning models. We finally itemise some recognise unresolved issues and also suggest future research areas in the field.