Context-Aware Visual Emotion Recognition Through Hierarchical Fusion of Facial Micro-Features and Scene Semantics

Visual emotion recognition in unconstrained environments remains challenging, as single-stream deep learning models often fail to capture the localized facial cues and contextual information necessary for accurate classification. This study introduces a hierarchical multi-level feature fusion framework that systematically combines low-level micro-textural features (Local Binary Patterns), mid-level facial cues (Facial Action Units), and high-level scene semantics (Places365) with ResNet-50 global embeddings. Evaluated on the large-scale EmoSet-3.3M dataset, which contains 3.3 million images across eight emotion categories, the framework demonstrates marked performance gains with the best configuration (LBP-FAUs-Places365-ResNet). The proposed framework achieves 74% accuracy and a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.75 under its best configuration (LBP-FAUs-Places365-ResNet), representing a five-percentage-point improvement over the ResNet-50 baseline. The approach excels at distinguishing high-intensity emotions, maintaining efficient inference (2.2 ms per image, 29 M parameters), and analysis confirms that integrating facial muscle activations with scene context enables nuanced emotional differentiation. These results validate that hierarchical feature integration significantly advances robust, human-aligned visual emotion recognition, making it suitable for real-world Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and affective computing applications.