Facial Expression Recognition on Wild and Multi-Label Faces with Deep Learning

The analysis of facial expressions is a powerful tool to decode nonverbal behavior in humans. Due to its importance, several studies have already been done in the past. However, facial expression recognition on wild and multi-label faces is under-investigated also due to the limited number of available databases. This paper fills in the current lack by challenging the RAF-ML dataset and fixing the state-of-the-art performance of 50.5% on the "single label experiment". The proposed method is also tested in a second experiment, suggested by this work, which considers only wild faces having a dominant expression. The benchmark performance for the second trial is 56.1%. The deep-learning algorithms presented in this work are described in detail to facilitate their reproduction. © 2023 IEEE.