Transfer Learning Technique with VGG-16 for Near-Infrared Facial Expression Recognition

In this paper, we investigate a deep learning vgg-16 network architecture for facial expression recognition under active near-infrared illumination condition and background. In particular, we consider the concept of transfer learning whereby features learned from high resolution images of huge datasets can be used to train a model of relatively small dataset without loosing the generalization ability. The pre-trained vgg-16 network architecture with transfer learning technique has been trained and validated on the Oulu-CASIA NIR dataset comprising of six (6) distinct facial expressions, and average test accuracy of 98.11% was achieved. The validation on our test data using the confusion, the precision, and the recall matrix reveals that our method achieves better results in comparison with the other methods in the literature.