© 2019 IEEE. Facial emotion detection and expressions are vital for applications that require credibility assessment, evaluating truthfulness, and detection of deception. However, most of the research reveal low accuracy in emotion detection mainly due to the low quality of images under consideration. Conducting intensive pre-processing activities and using artificial intelligence especially deep learning techniques are increasing accuracy in computational predictions. Our research focuses on emotion detection using deep learning techniques and combined preprocessing activities. We propose a solution that applies and compares four deep learning models for image pre-processing with the main objective to improve emotion recognition accuracy. Our methodology includes three major stages in the data value chain, pre-processing, deep learning and post-processing. We evaluate the proposed scheme on a real facial data set, namely Facial Image Data of Indian Film Stars for our study. The experimentation compares the performance of various deep learning techniques on the facial image data and confirms that our approach enhanced significantly the image quality using intensive pre-processing and deep-learning, improves accuracy in emotion prediction.