Article Details

Title · Authors · Abstract · Keywords · DOI · References

Research on Facial Expression Recognition Based on an Improved Lightweight MobileNetV3 Network

LI Jiaqi, LI Juan

(Wuchang Institute of Technology, Wuhan 430065, China)

Section:Artificial Intelligence · Vol. 2026, Issue 13 · Pages:34-39 · 2096-4706(2026)13-0034-06 · CLC number:TP391.4 · Document code:A · DOI:10.19850/j.cnki.2096-4706.2026.13.007

Abstract

Facial expression is one of the most intuitive forms of expressing human psychological states. Therefore, accurately recognizing facial expressions in images using computers is of great significance. This study proposes an improved lightweight MobileNetV3 network and introduces a class-balanced loss function to alleviate the imbalance in the numbers of image samples among different categories in the dataset. Meanwhile, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is employed to enhance the network’s ability to extract key information in both the channel and spatial dimensions. In addition, a Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) pooling module is proposed to enhance the model’s ability to identify important features during pooling. Finally, based on the RAF-DB dataset, the method distinguishes seven facial expression categories, namely anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise, and the overall test accuracy reaches 85.23%. The method not only achieves high recognition accuracy and strong robustness but also requires fewer parameters and shorter processing time, making it suitable for portable mobile devices.

Keywords

facial expression recognition; MobileNetV3; class-balanced loss; CBAM; SE pooling

References

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Funding

Collaborative Education Project of the Ministry of Education (2024CXHZ0205)

About the authors

Li Jiaqi (1997-), female, Han ethnicity, from Wuhan, Hubei Province, full-time teacher, master's degree, research direction: big data analysis, applied spectroscopy; Li Juan (1977-), female, Han ethnicity, from Huai'an, Jiangsu Province, professor, PhD, research direction: computer application technology.