Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics
Vol 15, No 1: February 2026

Facial expression recognition for emotional state identification using deep convolutional neural network

Abdelhakim Gharbi (Echahid Cheikh Larbi Tebessi University)
Abdeljalil Gattal (Université Echahid Cheikh Larbi Tebessi)
Issam Bendib (Echahid Cheikh Larbi Tebessi University)



Article Info

Publish Date
01 Feb 2026

Abstract

Facial expressions represent one of the most significant forms of non-verbal communication, with psychologists identifying six universal expressions: happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust. Recognizing these expressions presents considerable challenges due to the subtlety of facial movements and variations across individuals. This paper presents a deep learning-based system for facial expression recognition (FER) that employs convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify emotional states. We investigate both a novel CNN architecture developed from scratch and established transfer learning approaches, evaluating their performance on the FER-2013 dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed custom CNN architecture achieves 72.93% accuracy when combined with comprehensive data augmentation techniques, outperforming several baseline models. The system shows particular strength in recognizing fundamental emotions while maintaining computational efficiency suitable for real-time applications.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

EEI

Publisher

Subject

Electrical & Electronics Engineering

Description

Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (Buletin Teknik Elektro dan Informatika) ISSN: 2089-3191, e-ISSN: 2302-9285 is open to submission from scholars and experts in the wide areas of electrical, electronics, instrumentation, control, telecommunication and computer engineering from the ...