Emerging Science Journal
Vol. 10 No. 2 (2026): April

Detecting Genuine Versus Fake Emotions: A Dual-Task Deep Learning Approach Using Facial Expression Analysis

Sarah Tasnim Diya (Faculty of Science and Information Technology, Daffodil International University, Dhaka 1216)
Most. Jannatul Ferdos (Faculty of Science and Information Technology, Daffodil International University, Dhaka 1216)
Md. Mizanur Rahman (Faculty of Science and Information Technology, Daffodil International University, Dhaka 1216)
Yadab Sutradhar (Department of Computer Science, Maharishi International University, Fairfield, Iowa)
Zahura Zaman (Department of Computing, Boise State University, Idaho)
Suman Ahmmed (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, United International University, Dhaka 1212)
Ohidujjaman (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, United International University, Dhaka 1212)



Article Info

Publish Date
01 Apr 2026

Abstract

Facial expression recognition (FER) is a relevant field of study with applications in human-computer interaction, healthcare, and security. Although recent approaches demonstrate excellent outcomes on the recognition of basic emotions, the authenticity of expressions (genuine versus fake) remains unexplored. In this work, we propose a dual-task deep learning framework based on EfficientNet-B0, enhanced with a lightweight squeeze-and-excitation (SE) attention mechanism, to collaboratively work on multiclass emotion recognition (seven categories: angry, disgust, fear, happy, neutral, sad and surprise) and authenticity classification (genuine vs fake). The architecture leverages a shared backbone for representing feature, followed by task-dedicated branches trained using categorical cross-entropy and focal loss, respectively. To overcome the lack of publicly available benchmarks incorporating authenticity labels, we designed a curated dataset annotated with both emotional categories and authenticity information. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed dual-task model with the SE attention mechanism achieves 98.5% accuracy for emotion recognition and 92.2% accuracy for authenticity prediction, emphasizing both the effectiveness of the framework and the inherent challenges of authenticity detection. Moreover, we present a deployable real-time system demonstrating the feasibility of integrating authenticity-aware FER into practical applications such as e-learning analytics, security surveillance, and affective computing.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

ESJ

Publisher

Subject

Environmental Science

Description

Emerging Science Journal is not limited to a specific aspect of science and engineering but is instead devoted to a wide range of subfields in the engineering and sciences. While it encourages a broad spectrum of contribution in the engineering and sciences. Articles of interdisciplinary nature are ...