Weakly Supervised Local-Global Relation Network for Facial Expression Recognition

To extract crucial local features and enhance the complementary relation between local and global features, this paper proposes a Weakly Supervised Local-Global Relation Network (WS-LGRN), which uses the attention mechanism to deal with part location and feature fusion problems. Firstly, the Attention Map Generator quickly finds the local regions-of-interest under the supervision of image-level labels. Secondly, bilinear attention pooling is employed to generate and refine local features. Thirdly, Relational Reasoning Unit is designed to model the relation among all features before making classification. The weighted fusion mechanism in the Relational Reasoning Unit makes the model benefit from the complementary advantages between different features. In addition, contrastive losses are introduced for local and global features to increase the inter-class dispersion and intra-class compactness at different granularities. Experiments on lab-controlled and real-world facial expression dataset show that WS-LGRN achieves state-of-the-art performance, which demonstrates its superiority in FER.