Swin Transformer with Enhanced Dropout and Layer-wise Unfreezing for Facial Expression Recognition in Mental Health Detection

Abstract

This study presents an improved Facial Expression Recognition (FER) model using Swin transformers for enhanced performance in detecting mental health through facial emotion analysis. In addition, some techniques involving better dropout and layer-wise unfreezing were implemented to reduce model overfitting. This study evaluates the proposed models on benchmark datasets such as FER2013 and CK+ and real-time Genius HR data. Model A has no dropout layer, Model B has focal loss, and Model C has enhanced dropout and layer-wise unfreezing. Model C was the best among all proposed models, achieving test accuracies of 71.23% on FER2013 and 78.65% on CK+. Weighted cross-entropy loss and image augmentation were used to handle class imbalance. Based on Model C emotion predictions, a scoring mechanism was designed to analyze employees' mental health for the next 30 days. The higher the score, the higher the risk of mental health. This study demonstrates a practical version of the Swin transformer in FER models for detecting and early mental health intervention.