A New Lightweight Attention-Based Model for Emotion Recognition on Distorted Social Media Face Images.

The recognition of human emotions remains a challenging task for social media images. This is due to distortions created by different social media conflict with the minute changes in facial expression. This study presents a new model called the Global Spectral-Spatial Attention Network (GSSAN), which leverages both local and global information simultaneously. The proposed model comprises a shallow Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with an MBResNext block, which integrates the features extracted from MobileNet, ResNet, and DenseNet for extracting local features. In addition, to strengthen the discriminating power of the features, GSSAN incorporates Fourier features, which provide essential cues for minute changes in the face images. To test the proposed model for emotion recognition using social media images, we conduct experiments on two widely-used datasets: FER-2013 and AffectNet. The same benchmark datasets are uploaded and downloaded to create a distorted social media image dataset to test the proposed model. Experiments on distorted social media images dataset show that the model surpasses the accuracy of SOTA models by 0.69% for FER-2013 and 0.51% for AffectNet social media datasets. The same inference can be drawn from the experiments on standard datasets.