Identity-Free Facial Expression Recognition Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

A novel Identity-Free conditional Generative Adversarial Network (IF-GAN) was proposed for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) to explicitly reduce high inter-subject variations caused by identity-related facial attributes, e.g., age, race, and gender. As part of an end-to-end system, a cGAN was designed to transform a given input facial expression to an ƒ??averageƒ? identity face with the same expression as the input. Then, identity-free FER is possible since the generated images have the same synthetic ƒ??averageƒ? identity and differ only in their displayed expressions. Experiments on four facial expression datasets, one with spontaneous expressions, show that IF-GAN outperforms the baseline CNN and achieves state-of-the-art performance for FER.