Abstract
In this paper, we propose a compact frame-based facial expression recognition framework for facial expression recognition which achieves very competitive performance with respect to state-of-the-art methods while using much less parameters. The proposed framework is extended to a frame-to-sequence approach by exploiting temporal information with gated recurrent units. In addition, we develop an illumination augmentation scheme to alleviate the overfitting problem when training the deep networks with hybrid data sources. Finally, we demonstrate the performance improvement by using the proposed technique on some public datasets.