Emotion Classification Using a Tensorflow Generative Adversarial Network Implementation

The detection of human emotions has applicability in various domains such as assisted living, health monitoring, domestic appliance control, crowd behavior tracking real time, and emotional security. The paper proposes a new system for emotion classification based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) classifier. The generative adversarial networks have been widely used for generating realistic images, but the classification capabilities have been vaguely exploited. One of the main advantages is that by using the generator, we can extend our testing dataset and add more variety to each of the seven emotion classes we try to identify. Thus, the novelty of our study consists in increasing the number of classes from N to 2N (in the learning phase) by considering real and fake emotions. Facial key points are obtained from real and generated facial images, and vectors connecting them with the facial center of gravity are used by the discriminator to classify the image as one of the 14 classes of interest (real and fake for seven emotions). As another contribution, real images from different emotional classes are used in the generation process unlike the classical GAN approach which generates images from simple noise arrays. By using the proposed method, our system can classify emotions in facial images regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age and face rotation. An accuracy of 75.2% was obtained on 7000 real images (14,000, also considering the generated images) from multiple combined facial datasets.