Can AI recognise emotions in faces at coarse-grained level ?

Happy/sad/angry/surprised — solved at video-call quality. Subtler microexpressions are still hard.

---

AI systems can recognise emotions in faces at a coarse-grained level, such as distinguishing between happiness, sadness, and anger, with a reasonable degree of accuracy. This is achieved through the use of deep learning models, particularly convolutional neural networks, which are trained on large datasets of facial images. These models can learn to identify the subtle patterns and features of the face that are associated with different emotions. The performance of these systems is continually improving as larger and more diverse datasets become available for training.

— Enriched May 9, 2026 · Source: IEEE — https://ieeexplore.ieee.org