Emotic Masked Autoencoder with Attention Fusion for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is a critical task within computer vision with diverse applications across various domains. Addressing the challenge of limited FER datasets, which hampers the generalization capability of expression recognition models, is imperative for enhancing performance. Our paper presents an innovative approach integrating the MAE-Face self-supervised learning (SSL) method and Fusion Attention mechanism for expression classification, particularly showcased in the 6th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition. Additionally, we propose preprocessing techniques to emphasize essential facial features, thereby enhancing model performance on both training and validation sets, notably demonstrated on the Aff-wild2 dataset.