Beyond Basic Emotions: High-Accuracy Facial Expression Classification Using a CNN-SVM Hybrid Model

Facial expression recognition, besides its widespread use for human-machine interaction and emotional understanding, is a hard-to-address task due to the complicated nature and fine features of facial movements. In this research, an innovative deep learning heuristic model is proffered with CNN which is used for feature extraction and SVM for classification. It is aimed at enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of facial expression classification. The main concern of our model is the expression that knits together the five emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, and contempt. It is trained and tested on an image dataset captured on the grounds of different conditions. The methodology consists of a two-stage process where CNN whose sole purpose is to derive high-level features that are fully segregated by the SVM’s classification pipeline. This method makes a smart application of two kinds of techniques for CNN specialization in conveying intricate and sophisticated features and SVM suitability as a quality classifier. The model accomplished an accuracy of 95.96% in discerning the facial expressions and thus is anticipated to surpass the existing methods of the only category in terms of reliability and accuracy. Our discovery shows that the hybrid CNN-SVM model is not only efficient but also makes it possible to stand out as a unique approach that could apply to other image classification (recognition) tasks by just tweaking things slightly. With the developed model, we can come up with new approaches for research in affective computing. At the same time, such AI technology can be implemented in the systems of emotion recognition making them much more intuitional and responsive.