Transfer Learning for Facial Expression Recognition

Abstract

Facial expressions reflect psychological states and are crucial for understanding human emotions. Traditional facial expression recognition methods face challenges in real-world healthcare applications due to variations in facial structure, lighting conditions and occlusion. We present a methodology based on transfer learning with the pre-trained models VGG-19 and ResNet-152, and we highlight dataset-specific preprocessing techniques that include resizing images to 124 × 124 pixels, augmenting the data and selectively freezing layers to enhance the robustness of the model. This study explores the application of deep learning-based facial expression recognition in healthcare, particularly for remote patient monitoring and telemedicine, where accurate facial expression recognition can enhance patient assessment and early diagnosis of psychological conditions such as depression and anxiety. The proposed method achieved an average accuracy of 0.98 on the CK+ dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in controlled environments. However performance varied across datasets, with accuracy rates of 0.44 on FER2013 and 0.89 on JAFFE, reflecting the challenges posed by noisy and diverse data. Our findings emphasize the potential of deep learning-based facial expression recognition in healthcare applications while underscoring the importance of dataset-specific model optimization to improve generalization across different data distributions. This research contributes to the advancement of automated facial expression recognition in telemedicine, supporting enhanced doctor–patient communication and improving patient care.