journal name manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) 1 A Comparison of Humans and Machine Learning 2 Classifiers Detecting Emotion from Faces of People 3 with Different Coverings 4 Harisu Abdullahi Shehu · Will N. 5 Browne · Hedwig Eisenbarth 6 7 Received: 9th August 2021 / Accepted: date 8 Abstract Partial face coverings such as sunglasses and face masks uninten- 9 tionally obscure facial expressions, causing a loss of accuracy when humans 10 and computer systems attempt to categorise emotion. Experimental Psychol- 11 ogy would benefit from understanding how computational systems differ from 12 humans when categorising emotions as automated recognition systems become 13 available. We investigated the impact of sunglasses and different face masks on 14 the ability to categorize emotional facial expressions in humans and computer 15 systems to directly compare accuracy in a naturalistic context. Computer sys- 16 tems, represented by the VGG19 deep learning algorithm, and humans assessed 17 images of people with varying emotional facial expressions and with four dif- 18 ferent types of coverings, i.e. unmasked, with a mask covering lower-face, a 19 partial mask with transparent mouth window, and with sunglasses. Further- Harisu Abdullahi Shehu (Corresponding author) School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, 6012 Wellington E-mail:
[email protected] ORCID: 0000-0002-9689-3290 Will N. Browne School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics, Queensland University of Technology, Bris- bane QLD 4000, Australia Tel: +61 45 2468 148 E-mail:
[email protected] ORCID: 0000-0001-8979-2224 Hedwig Eisenbarth School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, 6012 Wellington Tel: +64 4 463 9541 E-mail:
[email protected] ORCID: 0000-0002-0521-2630 2 Shehu H.