# Identity-Free Facial Expression Recognition using conditional Generative Adversarial Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08051/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Distract Your Attention: Multi-head Cross Attention Network for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07270/) (2021)
- [Disentangling Identity and Pose for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08106/) (2022)
- [Using Self-Supervised Auxiliary Tasks to Improve Fine-Grained Facial Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06421/) (2021)
- [DeepStroke: An Efficient Stroke Screening Framework for Emergency Rooms with Multimodal Adversarial Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12065/) (2021)
- [PAtt-Lite: Lightweight Patch and Attention MobileNet for Challenging Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09626/) (2023)
- [Mid-level Representation Enhancement and Graph Embedded Uncertainty Suppressing for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13235/) (2022)
- [FaceTopoNet: Facial Expression Recognition using Face Topology Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06322/) (2022)
- [QCS: Feature Refining from Quadruplet Cross Similarity for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01988/) (2024)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13653/) (2023)
- [Multi-threshold Deep Metric Learning for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16434/) (2024)
- [Semantic Data Augmentation for Long-tailed Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17254/) (2024)
- [Domain Adaptation for Facial Expression Classifier via Domain Discrimination and Gradient Reversal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01467/) (2021)
- [Audio-visual video face hallucination with frequency supervision and cross modality support by speech based lip reading loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10883/) (2022)
- [OCFER-Net: Recognizing Facial Expression in Online Learning System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06379/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A novel Identity-Free conditional Generative Adversarial Network (IF-GAN) was proposed for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) to explicitly reduce high inter-subject variations caused by identity-related facial attributes, e.g., age, race, and gender. As part of an end-to-end system, a cGAN was designed to transform a given input facial expression image to an "average" identity face with the same expression as the input. Then, identity-free FER is possible since the generated images have the same synthetic "average" identity and differ only in their displayed expressions. Experiments on four facial expression datasets, one with spontaneous expressions, show that IF-GAN outperforms the baseline CNN and achieves state-of-the-art performance for FER.