Public mental health through social media in the post COVID-19 era

Social media is a powerful communication tool and a reflection of our digital environment. Social media acted as an augmenter and influencer during and after COVID-19. Many of the people sharing social media posts were not actually aware of their mental health status. This situation warrants to automate the detection of mental disorders. This paper presents a methodology for the detection of mental disorders using micro facial expressions. Micro-expressions are momentary, involuntary facial expressions that can be indicative of deeper feelings and mental states. Nevertheless, manually detecting and interpreting micro-expressions can be rather challenging. A deep learning HybridMicroNet model, based on convolution neural networks, is proposed for emotion recognition from micro-expressions. Further, a case study for the detection of mental health has been undertaken. The findings demonstrated that the proposed model achieved a high accuracy when attempting to diagnose mental health disorders based on micro-expressions. The attained accuracy on the CASME dataset was 99.08%, whereas the accuracy that was achieved on SAMM dataset was 97.62%. Based on these findings, deep learning may prove to be an effective method for diagnosing mental health conditions by analyzing micro-expressions

Detecting Micro-Expressions in Real Time Using High-Speed Video Sequences

Micro-expressions (ME) are brief, fast facial movements that occur in high-stake situations when people try to conceal their feelings, as a form of either suppression or repression. They are reliable sources of deceit detection and human behavior understanding. Automatic analysis of micro-expression is challenging because of their short duration (they occur as fast as 1/15–1/25 of a second) and their low movement amplitude. In this study, we report a fast and robust micro-expression detection framework, which analyzes the subtle movement variations that occur around the most prominent facial regions using two absolute frame differences and simple classifier to predict the micro-expression frames. The robustness of the system is increased by further processing the preliminary predictions of the classifier: the appropriate predicted micro-expression intervals are merged together and the intervals that are too short are filtered out