Facial Emotion Recognition Using Conventional Machine Learning and Deep Learning Methods: Current Achievements, Analysis and Remaining Challenges

Facial emotion recognition using deep quantum and advanced transfer learning mechanism

Introduction

Facial expressions have become a common way for interaction among humans. People cannot comprehend and predict the emotions or expressions of individuals through simple vision. Thus, in psychology, detecting facial expressions or emotion analysis demands an assessment and evaluation of decisions for identifying the emotions of a person or any group during communication. With the recent evolution of technology, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has gained significant usage, wherein DL (Deep Learning) based algorithms are employed for detecting facial expressions.

Methods

The study proposes a system design that detects facial expressions by extracting relevant features using a Modified ResNet model. The proposed system stacks building-blocks with residual connections and employs an advanced extraction method with quantum computing, which significantly reduces computation time compared to conventional methods. The backbone stem utilizes a quantum convolutional layer comprised of several parameterized quantum-filters. Additionally, the research integrates residual connections in the ResNet-18 model with the Modified up Sampled Bottle Neck Process (MuS-BNP), retaining computational efficacy while benefiting from residual connections.

Results

The proposed model demonstrates superior performance by overcoming the issue of maximum similarity within varied facial expressions. The system's ability to accurately detect and differentiate between expressions is measured using performance metrics such as accuracy, F1-score, recall, and precision.

Discussion

This performance analysis confirms the efficacy of the proposed system, highlighting the advantages of quantum computing in feature extraction and the integration of residual connections. The model achieves quantum superiority, providing faster and more accurate computations compared to existing methodologies. The results suggest that the proposed approach offers a promising solution for facial expression recognition tasks, significantly improving both speed and accuracy.

Improved optimizer with deep learning model for emotion detection and classification

Facial emotion recognition (FER) is largely utilized to analyze human emotion in order to address the needs of many real-time applications such as computer-human interfaces, emotion detection, forensics, biometrics, and human-robot collaboration. Nonetheless, existing methods are mostly unable to offer correct predictions with a minimum error rate. In this paper, an innovative facial emotion recognition framework, termed extended walrus-based deep learning with Botox feature selection network (EWDL-BFSN), was designed to accurately detect facial emotions. The main goals of the EWDL-BFSN are to identify facial emotions automatically and effectively by choosing the optimal features and adjusting the hyperparameters of the classifier. The gradient wavelet anisotropic filter (GWAF) can be used for image pre-processing in the EWDL-BFSN model. Additionally, SqueezeNet is used to extract significant features. The improved Botox optimization algorithm (IBoA) is then used to choose the best features. Lastly, FER and classification are accomplished through the use of an enhanced optimization-based kernel residual 50 (EK-ResNet50) network. Meanwhile, a nature-inspired metaheuristic, walrus optimization algorithm (WOA) is utilized to pick the hyperparameters of EK-ResNet50 network model. The EWDL-BFSN model was trained and tested with publicly available CK+ and FER-2013 datasets. The Python platform was applied for implementation, and various performance metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score were analyzed with state-of-the-art methods. The proposed EWDL-BFSN model acquired an overall accuracy of 99.37 and 99.25% for both CK+ and FER-2013 datasets and proved its superiority in predicting facial emotions over state-of-the-art methods.

Text-Mining and Video Analytics of COVID-19 Narratives Shared by Patients on YouTube

This study explores how individuals who have experienced COVID-19 share their stories on YouTube, focusing on the nature of information disclosure, public engagement, and emotional impact pertaining to consumer health. Using a dataset of 186 YouTube videos, we used text mining and video analytics techniques to analyze textual transcripts and visual frames to identify themes, emotions, and their relationship with viewer engagement metrics. Findings reveal eight key themes: infection origins, symptoms, treatment, mental well-being, isolation, prevention, government directives, and vaccination. While viewers engaged most with videos about infection origins, treatment, and vaccination, fear and sadness in the text consistently drove views, likes, and comments. Visuals primarily conveyed happiness and sadness, but their influence on engagement varied. This research highlights the crucial role YouTube plays in disseminating COVID-19 patient narratives and suggests its potential for improving health communication strategies. By understanding how emotions and content influence viewer engagement, healthcare professionals and public health officials can tailor their messaging to better connect with the public and address pandemic-related anxieties.

The cross-race effect in automatic facial expression recognition violates measurement invariance

Emotion has been a subject undergoing intensive research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience over several decades. Recently, more and more studies of emotion have adopted automatic rather than manual methods of facial emotion recognition to analyze images or videos of human faces. Compared to manual methods, these computer-vision-based, automatic methods can help objectively and rapidly analyze a large amount of data. These automatic methods have also been validated and believed to be accurate in their judgments. However, these automatic methods often rely on statistical learning models (e.g., deep neural networks), which are intrinsically inductive and thus suffer from problems of induction. Specifically, the models that were trained primarily on Western faces may not generalize well to accurately judge Eastern faces, which can then jeopardize the measurement invariance of emotions in cross-cultural studies. To demonstrate such a possibility, the present study carries out a cross-racial validation of two popular facial emotion recognition systems-FaceReader and DeepFace-using two Western and two Eastern face datasets. Although both systems could achieve overall high accuracies in the judgments of emotion category on the Western datasets, they performed relatively poorly on the Eastern datasets, especially in recognition of negative emotions. While these results caution the use of these automatic methods of emotion recognition on non-Western faces, the results also suggest that the measurements of happiness outputted by these automatic methods are accurate and invariant across races and hence can still be utilized for cross-cultural studies of positive psychology.

Deep Learning and Vision-Based Early Drowning Detection

Drowning is one of the top five causes of death for children aged 1–14 worldwide. According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), drowning is the third most common reason for unintentional fatalities. Designing a drowning detection system is becoming increasingly necessary in order to ensure the safety of swimmers, particularly children. This paper presents a computer vision and deep learning-based early drowning detection approach. We utilized five convolutional neural network models and trained them on our data. These models are SqueezeNet, GoogleNet, AlexNet, ShuffleNet, and ResNet50. ResNet50 showed the best performance, as it achieved 100% prediction accuracy with a reasonable training time. When compared to other approaches, the proposed approach performed exceptionally well in terms of prediction accuracy and computational cost.

An empirical study on the use of a facial emotion recognition system in guidance counseling utilizing the technology acceptance model and the general comfort questionnaire

Purpose

The goal of this study is to test the real-world use of an emotion recognition system.

Design/methodology/approach

The researchers chose an existing algorithm that displayed high accuracy and speed. Four emotions: happy, sadness, anger and surprise, are used from six of the universal emotions, associated by their own mood markers. The mood-matrix interface is then coded as a web application. Four guidance counselors and 10 students participated in the testing of the mood-matrix. Guidance counselors answered the technology acceptance model (TAM) to assess its usefulness, and the students answered the general comfort questionnaire (GCQ) to assess their comfort levels.

Findings

Results from TAM found that the mood-matrix has significant use for the guidance counselors and the GCQ finds that the students were comfortable during testing.

Originality/value

No study yet has tested an emotion recognition system applied to counseling or any mental health or psychological transactions.

Leveraging Reddit for Suicidal Ideation Detection: A Review of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Techniques

Suicide is a major public-health problem that exists in virtually every part of the world. Hundreds of thousands of people commit suicide every year. The early detection of suicidal ideation is critical for suicide prevention. However, there are challenges associated with conventional suicide-risk screening methods. At the same time, individuals contemplating suicide are increasingly turning to social media and online forums, such as Reddit, to express their feelings and share their struggles with suicidal thoughts. This prompted research that applies machine learning and natural language processing techniques to detect suicidality among social media and forum users. The objective of this paper is to investigate methods employed to detect suicidal ideations on the Reddit forum. To achieve this objective, we conducted a literature review of the recent articles detailing machine learning and natural language processing techniques applied to Reddit data to detect the presence of suicidal ideations. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, we selected 26 recent studies, published between 2018 and 2022. The findings of the review outline the prevalent methods of data collection, data annotation, data preprocessing, feature engineering, model development, and evaluation. Furthermore, we present several Reddit-based datasets utilized to construct suicidal ideation detection models. Finally, we conclude by discussing the current limitations and future directions in the research of suicidal ideation detection.