Wearing a facial mask is indispensable in the COVID-19 pandemic; however, it has tremendous effects on the performance of existing facial emotion recognition approaches. In this paper, we propose a feature vector technique comprising three main steps to recognize emotions from facial mask images. First, a synthetic mask is used to cover the facial input image. With only the upper part of the image showing, and including only the eyes, eyebrows, a portion of the bridge of the nose, and the forehead, the boundary and regional representation technique is applied. Second, a feature extraction technique based on our proposed rapid landmark detection method employing the infinity shape is utilized to flexibly extract a set of feature vectors that can effectively indicate the characteristics of the partially occluded masked face. Finally, those features, including the location of the detected landmarks and the Histograms of the Oriented Gradients, are brought into the classification process by adopting CNN and LSTM; the experimental results are then evaluated using images from the CK+ and RAF-DB data sets. As the result, our proposed method outperforms existing cutting-edge approaches and demonstrates better performance, achieving 99.30% and 95.58% accuracy on CK+ and RAF-DB, respectively.

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