Aiming at the problems of insufficient generalization ability, poor stability and difficulty in meeting the real-time requirement of facial expression recognition, a real-time facial expression recognition method based on multi-scale kernel feature convolutional neural network was proposed. Firstly, an improved MSSD (MobileNet+Single Shot multiBox Detector) lightweight face detection network was proposed, and the detected face coordinates information was tracked by Kernel Correlation Filter (KCF) model to improve the detection speed and stability. Then, three linear bottlenecks of three different scale convolution kernels were used to form three branches. The multi-scale kernel convolution unit was formed by the feature fusion of channel combination, and the diversity feature was used to improve the accuracy of expression recognition. Finally, in order to improve the generalization ability of the model and prevent over-fitting, different linear transformation methods were used for data enhancement to augment the dataset, and the model trained on the FER-2013 facial expression dataset was migrated to the small sample CK+ dataset for retraining. The experimental results show that the recognition rate of the proposed method on the FER-2013 dataset reaches 73.0%, which is 1.8% higher than that of the Kaggle Expression Recognition Challenge champion, and the recognition rate of the proposed method on the CK+ dataset reaches 99.5%. For 640×480 video, the face detection speed of the proposed method reaches 158 frames per second, which is 6.3 times of that of the mainstream face detection network MTCNN (MultiTask Cascaded Convolutional Neural Network). At the same time, the overall speed of face detection and expression recognition of the proposed method reaches 78 frames per second. It can be seen that the proposed method can achieve fast and accurate facial expression recognition.
