<p>Ablation study of OQ-FERNet.</p>

To address these issues, this paper proposes OQ-FERNet, an occlusion-aware quantitative facial expression recognition network. The proposed network adopts MobileNetV4-Conv-S as a lightweight facial expression feature extraction backbone to obtain compact and discriminative representations with low computational cost.

On this basis, an Occlusion-aware Regional Reweighting module is designed to divide the feature map into upper-face, middle-face, and lower-face regions, and adaptively adjust their contributions according to regional reliability. This design suppresses occluded or less informative facial areas while enhancing visible expression-related cues. Furthermore, a Quantitative Emotion Prediction Head is introduced to jointly perform discrete expression classification and emotion intensity estimation, enabling the model to provide both categorical and fine-grained affective outputs.