# Video-based Facial Expression Recognition using Graph Convolutional Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.13386 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13386/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Prompting Visual-Language Models for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13382/) (2023)
- [NR-DFERNet: Noise-Robust Network for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04975/) (2022)
- [Graph-based Facial Affect Analysis: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15599/) (2021)
- [BAH Dataset for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition in Videos for Digital Behavioural Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19328/) (2025)
- [GRATIS: Deep Learning Graph Representation with Task-specific Topology and Multi-dimensional Edge Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12482/) (2022)
- [MC-ViViT: Multi-branch Classifier-ViViT to detect Mild Cognitive Impairment in older adults using facial videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05292/) (2023)
- [Guided Interpretable Facial Expression Recognition via Spatial Action Unit Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00281/) (2024)
- [Two-stage Temporal Modelling Framework for Video-based Depression Recognition using Graph Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15266/) (2021)
- [FaceTopoNet: Facial Expression Recognition using Face Topology Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06322/) (2022)
- [Transform-Equivariant Consistency Learning for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04123/) (2023)
- [Joint Top-Down and Bottom-Up Frameworks for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15615/) (2024)
- [GCF: Graph Convolutional Networks for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02361/) (2024)
- [Contrastive learning-based video quality assessment-jointed video vision transformer for video recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10965/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Facial expression recognition (FER), aiming to classify the expression present in the facial image or video, has attracted a lot of research interests in the field of artificial intelligence and multimedia. In terms of video based FER task, it is sensible to capture the dynamic expression variation among the frames to recognize facial expression. However, existing methods directly utilize CNN-RNN or 3D CNN to extract the spatial-temporal features from different facial units, instead of concentrating on a certain region during expression variation capturing, which leads to limited performance in FER. In our paper, we introduce a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) layer into a common CNN-RNN based model for video-based FER. First, the GCN layer is utilized to learn more significant facial expression features which concentrate on certain regions after sharing information between extracted CNN features of nodes. Then, a LSTM layer is applied to learn long-term dependencies among the GCN learned features to model the variation. In addition, a weight assignment mechanism is also designed to weight the output of different nodes for final classification by characterizing the expression intensities in each frame. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to use GCN in FER task. We evaluate our method on three widely-used datasets, CK+, Oulu-CASIA and MMI, and also one challenging wild dataset AFEW8.0, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method has superior performance to existing methods.