A novel driver emotion recognition system based on deep ensemble classification

Abstract

Driver emotion classification is an important topic that can raise awareness of driving habits because many drivers are overconfident and unaware of their bad driving habits. Drivers will acquire insight into their poor driving behaviors and be better able to avoid future accidents if their behavior is automatically identified. In this paper, we use different models such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and multi-layer perceptron classification models to construct an ensemble convolutional neural network-based enhanced driver facial expression recognition model. First, the faces of the drivers are discovered using the faster region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) model, which can recognize faces in real-time and offline video reliably and effectively. The feature-fusing technique is utilized to integrate the features extracted from three CNN models, and the fused features are then used to train the suggested ensemble classification model. To increase the accuracy and efficiency of face detection, a new convolutional neural network block (InceptionV3) replaces the improved Faster R-CNN feature-learning block. To evaluate the proposed face detection and driver facial expression recognition (DFER) datasets, we achieved an accuracy of 98.01%, 99.53%, 99.27%, 96.81%, and 99.90% on the JAFFE, CK+, FER-2013, AffectNet, and custom-developed datasets, respectively. The custom-developed dataset has been recorded as the best among all under the simulation environment. © 2023, The Author(s).