Benchmarking commercial emotion detection systems using realistic distortions of facial image datasets

Abstract

Currently, there are several widely used commercial cloud-based services that attempt to recognize an individual’s emotions based on their facial expressions. Most research into facial emotion recognition has used high-resolution, front-oriented, full-face images. However, when images are collected in naturalistic settings (e.g., using smartphone’s frontal camera), these images are likely to be far from ideal due to camera positioning, lighting conditions, and camera shake. The impact these conditions have on the accuracy of commercial emotion recognition services has not been studied in full detail. To fill this gap, we selected five prominent commercial emotion recognition systems—Amazon R..