A Comprehensive Exploration: Attention Mechanisms in Facial Emotion Recognition

Facial emotion recognition, a vital aspect of human-computer interaction, has witnessed significant advancements with the integration of attention mechanisms in recent years. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of attention mechanisms in facial emotion recognition. Various types of attention mechanisms have been explored including channel attention, spatial attention, CBAM (Convolutional Block Attention Module), self-attention, and multi-head attention. The survey delves into the basic understanding of each attention mechanism. By examining a wide range of recent studies and methodologies, this research paper synthesizes the advantages, challenges, and limitations of different attention mechanisms, shedding light on their interpretability, computational complexity, and adaptability to diverse facial expressions.