A Comprehensive Approach to Facial Emotion Recognition: Integrating Established Techniques with a Tailored Model


Student Name: Venkata Sai Krishna Chaitanya Addepalli
Defense Date:
Location: Eaton Hall, Room 2001B
Chair: David Johnson

Prasad Kulkarni

Hongyang Sun

Abstract:

Facial emotion recognition has become a pivotal application of machine learning, enabling advancements in human-computer interaction, behavioral analysis, and mental health monitoring. Despite its potential, challenges such as data imbalance, variation in expressions, and noisy datasets often hinder accurate prediction.

 This project presents a novel approach to facial emotion recognition by integrating established techniques like data augmentation and regularization with a tailored convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. Using the FER2013 dataset, the study explores the impact of incremental architectural improvements, optimized hyperparameters, and dropout layers to enhance model performance.

 The proposed model effectively addresses issues related to data imbalance and overfitting while achieving enhanced accuracy and precision in emotion classification. The study underscores the importance of feature extraction through convolutional layers and optimized fully connected networks for efficient emotion recognition. The results demonstrate improvements in generalization, setting a foundation for future real-time applications in diverse fields. 

Degree: MS Project Defense (CS)
Degree Type: MS Project Defense
Degree Field: Computer Science