# SAFER: Situation Aware Facial Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09372 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09372/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [Suppressing Uncertainties for Large-Scale Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10392/) (2020)
- [Region Attention Networks for Pose and Occlusion Robust Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04075/) (2019)
- [Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05913/) (2019)
- [Bias in Machine Learning Software: Why? How? What to do?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12195/) (2021)
- [Dive into Ambiguity: Latent Distribution Mining and Pairwise Uncertainty Estimation for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00232/) (2021)
- [BlazeFace: Sub-millisecond Neural Face Detection on Mobile GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05047/) (2019)
- [Context Based Emotion Recognition using EMOTIC Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13401/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present SAFER, a novel system for emotion recognition from facial expressions. It employs state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to extract various features from facial images and incorporates contextual information, such as background and location type, to enhance its performance. The system has been designed to operate in an open-world setting, meaning it can adapt to unseen and varied facial expressions, making it suitable for real-world applications. An extensive evaluation of SAFER against existing works in the field demonstrates improved performance, achieving an accuracy of 91.4% on the CAER-S dataset. Additionally, the study investigates the effect of novelty such as face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic on facial emotion recognition and critically examines the limitations of mainstream facial expressions datasets. To address these limitations, a novel dataset for facial emotion recognition is proposed. The proposed dataset and the system are expected to be useful for various applications such as human-computer interaction, security, and surveillance.