Back To Projects

Detecting Facial Expressions

Bertran M.

This paper shows that machine learning algorithms can be used in order to classify emotions into different categories. The most promising results were from the K-nearest neighbor model, with 61.5% accuracy in the training set, and 32.1% accuracy in the testing set.


The research question put forward by this paper is “To what extent can emotion detection artificial intelligence algorithms be used in order to improve education, business success, employee safety, healthcare and video game testing?” This paper looks to be able to give the consumers of the solution the ability to pinpoint which emotions educators, healthcare workers, video game testers and consumers of their business are feeling in order to improve their quality. In all of the areas that have been previously mentioned, there is a large inability to be able to identify when certain workers are feeling certain emotions, as a result of lack of recall memory, lack of honesty, or simply lack of awareness. In order to identify the satisfaction and dissatisfaction of healthcare workers, educators, video game testers and consumers of a business at certain moments, the quality of healthcare, education, video games and business websites will all increase respectively by being able to identify when workers are feeling a certain way, and how to reinforce or reduce the emotions being felt during those moments. In order to solve this problem, many classification algorithms will be explored, such as convolutional neural networks, K nearest neighbor, multi-layer perceptron classifier, amongst many others. These classification algorithms will look for a successful and quality classification of the images being presented in order to ensure excellence whenever this solution is implemented in the areas mentioned previously. By using the algorithms mentioned previously, the accuracy of the model was significantly higher than what it would have been had it been chosen randomly. For instance, with a convolutional neural network, there was an accuracy of 25%, whereas random assignment would have had a success rate of 14.29% The conclusions from this investigation are that artificial intelligence algorithms can be used in order to classify images into 7 categories according to the emotion being displayed on them, and this solution can and will be successfully implemented into the areas mentioned previously.

Explore More!

Bertran M.
Odysseas Drosis
PhD Candidate in Computer Science, Masters in Computer Science Alum from Cornell

Related Projects

The Impacts of Child-Mentor Relationships on Child Mental Health

In this paper, we use a dataset from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive to analyze the impacts of child-mentor relationships on child mental health. Previous studies have come to similar conclusions: positive parent-student and teacher-student relationships often lead to signs of positive mental health in children. To expand upon these past findings, we used different measures of mental health and relationship qualities to create a predictive model. We conducted classification and coefficient weight analyses to see how strong of an impact different variables representing indicators of healthy relationships had on different aspects of child mental health. This information was used to create predictions of future cases. Like previous studies, we found that there was a general pattern that showed that good child-mentor relationships, defined specifically by the frequency of praise and fights, had an overall positive impact on child mental health, specifically when it came to symptoms of depression. Furthermore, parents seemed to have stronger impacts on child mental health than teachers did. Limitations include possibly biased respondents who may not be representative of the greater population, as well as the specificity of the variables that were chosen. Going forward, further steps to analyze different datasets and deepen the scope of the research will be helpful in finding patterns and developing more detailed conclusions.
Samantha K.
Mentored by Akshay Jagadeesh
How Does One’s Background Determine Their Mental State?

Mental health issues have become very prevalent in recent times, and although significant progress has been made in terms of treatment in the form of counseling, medication, and other methods, in order to truly find out the root cause of many mental health issues, a correlation has to be drawn between one’s mental state and another factor, such as family history, age, work environment, etc. It is also beneficial to correlate one’s mental state with a multitude of factors to see the compilation.
Sohum T.
Mentored by Akshay Jagadeesh
AI Detection of Emotions through EEG

We proceeded to develop a recurrent neural network (RNN) model structure that could analyze an individual’s brain waves and predict their emotional condition.
Srinivas S.
Mentored by Nima Leclerc