<![CDATA[Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) has become an important area of research in affective computing, human–computer interaction, intelligent surveillance, and healthcare applications due to its ability to automatically identify and interpret human emotional states from facial expressions. This study presents a lightweight Sequential Convolutional Neural Network (S-CNN) framework for multi-class facial emotion recognition using facial expression images categorized into eight emotional classes: Anger, Contempt, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Neutral, Sad, and Surprised. The proposed framework integrates image preprocessing, data augmentation, convolutional feature extraction, and deep learning-based classification to develop an efficient and computationally lightweight emotion recognition system. The model was trained and evaluated using a publicly available facial expression dataset, with performance assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and confusion matrix analysis. Experimental results demonstrated strong classification performance, achieving an overall accuracy of 92%, a weighted precision of 87%, a weighted recall of 92%, and a weighted F1-score of 89%. The confusion matrix further revealed effective discrimination among most emotional categories, with only minor misclassification observed between visually similar expressions. Comparative analysis with established deep learning architectures reported in the literature, including VGG16, MobileNetV2, ResNet50, and EfficientNet-B0, highlights the potential effectiveness of the proposed lightweight architecture while maintaining lower computational complexity. The findings demonstrate that simplified CNN architectures can provide accurate and efficient facial emotion recognition, making them suitable for real-time and resource-constrained applications. Future research should explore larger benchmark datasets, cross-dataset validation, and advanced deep learning architectures to further improve generalization and robustness.]]>
