Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild with Application in Robotics

One of the major problems with robot companions is their lack of credibility. Since emotions play a key role in human behaviour their implementation in virtual agents is a conditio sine-qua-non for realistic models. That is, correct classification of facial expressions in the wild is a necessary preprocessing step for implementing artificial empathy. The aim of this work is to implement a robust Facial Expression Recognition (FER) module into a robot. Considering the results of an empirical comparison among the most successful deep learning algorithms used for FER, this study fixes the state-of the-art performance of 75% on the FER2013 database with the ensemble method. With a single model, the best performance of 70.8% has been reached using the VGG16 architecture. Finally, the VGG16-based FER module has been been implemented into a robot and reached a performance of 70% when tested with wild expressive faces.