Papers › Deep-Emotion: Facial Expression Recognition Using Attentional Convolutional Network
Deep-Emotion: Facial Expression Recognition Using Attentional Convolutional Network
Shervin Minaee, Amirali Abdolrashidi
Facial expression recognition has been an active research area over the past few decades, and it is still challenging due to the high intra-class variation. Traditional approaches for this problem rely on hand-crafted features such as SIFT, HOG and LBP, followed by a classifier trained on a database of images or videos. Most of these works perform reasonably well on datasets of images captured in a controlled condition, but fail to perform as good on more challenging datasets with more image variation and partial faces. In recent years, several works proposed an end-to-end framework for facial expression recognition, using deep learning models. Despite the better performance of these works, there still seems to be a great room for improvement. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach based on attentional convolutional network, which is able to focus on important parts of the face, and achieves significant improvement over previous models on multiple datasets, including FER-2013, CK+, FERG, and JAFFE. We also use a visualization technique which is able to find important face regions for detecting different emotions, based on the classifier's output. Through experimental results, we show that different emotions seems to be sensitive to different parts of the face.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Facial Expression Recognition (FER) | CK+ | DeepEmotion | Accuracy (7 emotion) | 98 | #7 of 7 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Facial Expression Recognition (FER) | FER2013 | DeepEmotion | Accuracy | 70.02 | #16 of 17 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Facial Expression Recognition (FER) | FERG | DeepEmotion | Accuracy | 99.3 | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Facial Expression Recognition (FER) | JAFFE | DeepEmotion | Accuracy | 92.8 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections