How I developed a C.N.N. that recognizes emotions and broke into the Kaggle top 10

A baby starts to recognize its parents’ faces when it is just a couple of weeks old. As it grows, this innate ability improves. By the time it is a few months old, it starts to display social cues and is able to understand basic emotions like a smile.

Thanks to millions of years of evolution, we are able to understand each other without using a single word. Just a look and that is all that takes to understand whether a person is crestfallen or elated. Well, I tried teaching computers to do just that. This article is a detailed account of how the whole experiment turned out. Follow along as we recreate the network.

Hellen Keller excellently described the essence of human emotions in the aforementioned quote. What was once reserved for animals is no longer limited to them. Machine learning is catching on at a mindnumbing pace. The onset of convolutional neural networks was a breakthrough and changed the way computers “look” at the world.

Facial expressions are nothing more than the arrangement of facial muscles to convey a certain emotional state to the observer. Emotions can be divided into six broad categories — Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, and Neutral. In this M.L. project, we will train a model to differentiate between these.

Related posts:

Innovation is a buzz word thrown around A LOT. What can be considered innovative? What IS considered to be innovative? I think that it’s an ongoing conversation rather than a direct answer. So, here…

I first encountered the Japanese animated film Princess Mononoke in college, a few years after it was released. An hour in, I was getting confused. Who were the villains? The film is hand-drawn by…

Recently I posted my third grade class photo and I can’t help but be fascinated by the little girl that I used to be in that picture. I was third from the left with two pigtails parted straight in…