Spontaneous Facial Micro-expression Recognition via Deep Convolutional Network

The automatic recognition of spontaneous facial micro-expressions becomes prevalent as it reveals the actual emotion of humans. However, handcrafted features employed for recognizing micro-expressions are designed for general applications and thus cannot well capture the subtle facial deformations of micro-expressions. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework to suit the particular needs of micro-expression recognition (MER). In the deep model, recurrent convolutional networks are utilized to learn the representation of subtle changes from image sequences. To guarantee the learning of deep model, we present a temporal jittering procedure to greatly enrich the training samples. Through performing the experiments on three spontaneous micro-expression datasets, i.e., SMIC, CASME, and CASME2, we verify the effectiveness of our proposed MER approach.