A novel deep learning model to improve the recognition of students’ facial expressions in online learning environments

With the fast development of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, automatic recognition of students’ facial expressions has received increased attention. Facial expressions are a kind of external manifestation of emotional states. It is important for teachers to assess students’ emotional states and adjust teaching activities accordingly. However, existing methods for automatic facial expression recognition have the limitations of low accuracy of recognition and poor feature extraction. To address the problem, this study proposed a novel deep learning model called DenseNetX-CBAM to improve facial expression recognition by utilizing a variant of densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNet) to reduce unnecessary parameters and strengthen the reuse of expression features between networks; moreover, convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was integrated to allow the networks to focus on important special regions and important channels when representing features. The proposed model was tested using 217 video clips of 33 students in an online course. The results demonstrated promising effects of the method in improving the accuracy of facial expression recognition, which can help teachers to accurately recognize students’ emotions and provide real-time adjustment in online learning environments.