TKFNet: Learning Texture Key Factor Driven Feature for Facial Expression Recognition
This addresses the problem of recognizing subtle facial expressions in uncontrolled environments for applications like human-computer interaction, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods.
The paper tackled facial expression recognition in the wild by focusing on texture key driver factors like micro-changes in skin around facial regions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on RAF-DB and KDEF datasets.
Facial expression recognition (FER) in the wild remains a challenging task due to the subtle and localized nature of expression-related features, as well as the complex variations in facial appearance. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explicitly focuses on Texture Key Driver Factors (TKDF), localized texture regions that exhibit strong discriminative power across emotional categories. By carefully observing facial image patterns, we identify that certain texture cues, such as micro-changes in skin around the brows, eyes, and mouth, serve as primary indicators of emotional dynamics. To effectively capture and leverage these cues, we propose a FER architecture comprising a Texture-Aware Feature Extractor (TAFE) and Dual Contextual Information Filtering (DCIF). TAFE employs a ResNet-based backbone enhanced with multi-branch attention to extract fine-grained texture representations, while DCIF refines these features by filtering context through adaptive pooling and attention mechanisms. Experimental results on RAF-DB and KDEF datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, verifying the effectiveness and robustness of incorporating TKDFs into FER pipelines.