Olugbenga Oluseun Oluwagbemi

The importance of facial expressions in nonverbal communication is significant because they help better represent the inner emotions of individuals. Emotions can depict the state of health and internal wellbeing of individuals. Facial expression detection has been a hot research topic in the last couple of years. The motivation for applying the convolutional neural network-10 (CNN-10) model for facial expression recognition stems from its ability to detect spatial features, manage translation invariance, understand expressive feature representations, gather global context, and achieve scalability, adaptability, and interoperability with transfer learning methods. This model offers a powerful instrument for reliably detecting and comprehending facial expressions, supporting usage in recognition of emotions, interaction between humans and computers, cognitive computing, and other areas. Earlier studies have developed different deep learning architectures to offer solutions to the challenge of facial expression recognition. Many of these studies have good performance on datasets of images taken under controlled conditions, but they fall short on more difficult datasets with more image diversity and incomplete faces. This paper applied CNN-10 and ViT models for facial emotion classification. The performance of the proposed models was compared with that of VGG19 and INCEPTIONV3. The CNN-10 outperformed the other models on the CK + dataset with a 99.9% accuracy score, FER-2013 with an accuracy of 84.3%, and JAFFE with an accuracy of 95.4%.