Facial emotion recognition (FER) systems play a significant role in identifying driver emotions. Accurate facial emotion recognition of drivers in autonomous vehicles reduces road rage. However, training even the advanced FER model without proper datasets causes poor performance in real-time testing. FER system performance is heavily affected by the quality of datasets than the quality of the algorithms. To improve FER system performance for autonomous vehicles, we propose a facial image threshing (FIT) machine that uses advanced features of pre-trained facial recognition and training from the Xception algorithm. The FIT machine involved removing irrelevant facial images, collecting facial images, correcting misplacing face data, and merging original datasets on a massive scale, in addition to the data-augmentation technique. The final FER results of the proposed method improved the validation accuracy by 16.95% over the conventional approach with the FER 2013 dataset. The confusion matrix evaluation based on the unseen private dataset shows a 5% improvement over the original approach with the FER 2013 dataset to confirm the real-time testing.
Keywords: CK+ Dataset; FER 2013 Dataset; MTCNN; ResNet; Xception; autonomous driving; convolution neural network (CNN); facial emotion recognition (FER).