Engineering Commons^™

Facial Landmark Feature Fusion In Transfer Learning Of Child Facial Expressions, Megan A. Witherow, Manar D. Samad, Norou Diawara, Khan M. Iftekharuddin

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Automatic classification of child facial expressions is challenging due to the scarcity of image samples with annotations. Transfer learning of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), pretrained on adult facial expressions, can be effectively finetuned for child facial expression classification using limited facial images of children. Recent work inspired by facial age estimation and age-invariant face recognition proposes a fusion of facial landmark features with deep representation learning to augment facial expression classification performance. We hypothesize that deep transfer learning of child facial expressions may also benefit from fusing facial landmark features. Our proposed model architecture integrates two input branches: a …