D^3FER: Dual Channel and Dual Branch Network for Robust Facial Expression Recognition under Dual Challenges

Facial expression recognition (FER) in the wild is challenged by co-occurring visual perturbations (e.g., occlusions, pose variations) and label noise. Existing methods often address these issues in isolation, failing to handle their compound effects effectively. To this end, we propose D^3FER (Dual channel and Dual branch framework for Dual challenges in FER), a unified framework tackling both issues simultaneously. D^3FER employs a dual-channel augmentation strategy with weak and strong views to achieve reliable pseudo-labeling. At its core, a dynamic queue mechanism is designed to address label noise by adaptively estimating noise thresholds directly from prediction confidence. Built upon this dynamically updated queue, a momentum-updated Query-Key dual-branch architecture is further developed to enhance feature compactness and discriminability. By virtue of the dynamic queue, the overall framework gains stronger robustness against the dual challenges of visual perturbations and label noise. During inference, the stable Key branch guarantees consistent predictions. Experiments on major in-the-wild benchmarks show D^3FER outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and robustness. The source code is available at https://github.com/D3FER/D3FER.