Two-stage Recognition and Beyond for Compound Facial Emotion Recognition

Facial emotion recognition is an inherently difficult problem, not only due to individual facial feature diversity but also racial and cultural differences. Compound facial emotion recognition makes the problem even more difficult because the discrimination between the dominant emotion and the complementary emotion is usually weak. To mitigate this problem, we propose the two-stage recognition method. The first stage is a coarse recognition stage and the second stage is a fine recognition stage. By doing this the classification for symmetrical emotion labels is enhanced. Beyond this, we make good use of the context information existing in the same label to correct some false-classification so that the recognition can be more robust. In this contest, our method can achieve very promising results.