Deep Facial Expression Recognition: A Survey

With the transition of facial expression recognition (FER) from laboratory-controlled to challenging in-the-wild conditions and the recent success of deep learning techniques in various fields, deep neural networks have increasingly been leveraged to learn discriminative representations for automatic FER. Recent deep FER systems generally focus on two important issues: overfitting caused by a lack of sufficient training data and expression-unrelated variations, such as illumination, head pose, and identity bias. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of deep FER, including datasets and algorithms that provide insights into these intrinsic problems. First, we introduce the available datasets that are widely used in the literature and provide accepted data selection and evaluation principles for these datasets. We then describe the standard pipeline of a deep FER system with the related background knowledge and suggestions for applicable implementations for each stage. For the state-of-the-art in deep FER, we introduce existing novel deep neural networks and related training strategies that are designed for FER based on both static images and dynamic image sequences and discuss their advantages and limitations. Competitive performances and experimental comparisons on widely used benchmarks are also summarized. We then extend our survey to additional related issues and application scenarios. Finally, we review the remaining challenges and corresponding opportunities in this field as well as future directions for the design of robust deep FER systems.