  Facial expression recognition is a challenging task due to two major
problems: the presence of inter-subject variations in facial expression
recognition dataset and impure expressions posed by human subjects. In this
paper we present a novel Human-to-Animation conditional Generative Adversarial
Network (HA-GAN) to overcome these two problems by using many (human faces) to
one (animated face) mapping. Specifically, for any given input human expression
image, our HA-GAN transfers the expression information from the input image to
a fixed animated identity. Stylized animated characters from the Facial
Expression Research Group-Database (FERGDB) are used for the generation of
fixed identity. By learning this many-to-one identity mapping function using
our proposed HA-GAN, the effect of inter-subject variations can be reduced in
Facial Expression Recognition(FER). We also argue that the expressions in the
generated animated images are pure expressions and since FER is performed on
these generated images, the performance of facial expression recognition is
improved. Our initial experimental results on the state-of-the-art datasets
show that facial expression recognition carried out on the generated animated
images using our HA-GAN framework outperforms the baseline deep neural network
and produces comparable or even better results than the state-of-the-art
methods for facial expression recognition.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition