24 research outputs found
Less is More: Micro-expression Recognition from Video using Apex Frame
Despite recent interest and advances in facial micro-expression research,
there is still plenty room for improvement in terms of micro-expression
recognition. Conventional feature extraction approaches for micro-expression
video consider either the whole video sequence or a part of it, for
representation. However, with the high-speed video capture of micro-expressions
(100-200 fps), are all frames necessary to provide a sufficiently meaningful
representation? Is the luxury of data a bane to accurate recognition? A novel
proposition is presented in this paper, whereby we utilize only two images per
video: the apex frame and the onset frame. The apex frame of a video contains
the highest intensity of expression changes among all frames, while the onset
is the perfect choice of a reference frame with neutral expression. A new
feature extractor, Bi-Weighted Oriented Optical Flow (Bi-WOOF) is proposed to
encode essential expressiveness of the apex frame. We evaluated the proposed
method on five micro-expression databases: CAS(ME), CASME II, SMIC-HS,
SMIC-NIR and SMIC-VIS. Our experiments lend credence to our hypothesis, with
our proposed technique achieving a state-of-the-art F1-score recognition
performance of 61% and 62% in the high frame rate CASME II and SMIC-HS
databases respectively.Comment: 14 pages double-column, author affiliations updated, acknowledgment
of grant support adde
Shallow Triple Stream Three-dimensional CNN (STSTNet) for Micro-expression Recognition
In the recent year, state-of-the-art for facial micro-expression recognition
have been significantly advanced by deep neural networks. The robustness of
deep learning has yielded promising performance beyond that of traditional
handcrafted approaches. Most works in literature emphasized on increasing the
depth of networks and employing highly complex objective functions to learn
more features. In this paper, we design a Shallow Triple Stream
Three-dimensional CNN (STSTNet) that is computationally light whilst capable of
extracting discriminative high level features and details of micro-expressions.
The network learns from three optical flow features (i.e., optical strain,
horizontal and vertical optical flow fields) computed based on the onset and
apex frames of each video. Our experimental results demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed STSTNet, which obtained an unweighted average
recall rate of 0.7605 and unweighted F1-score of 0.7353 on the composite
database consisting of 442 samples from the SMIC, CASME II and SAMM databases.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, Accepted and published in IEEE FG 201
Spontaneous Subtle Expression Detection and Recognition based on Facial Strain
Optical strain is an extension of optical flow that is capable of quantifying
subtle changes on faces and representing the minute facial motion intensities
at the pixel level. This is computationally essential for the relatively new
field of spontaneous micro-expression, where subtle expressions can be
technically challenging to pinpoint. In this paper, we present a novel method
for detecting and recognizing micro-expressions by utilizing facial optical
strain magnitudes to construct optical strain features and optical strain
weighted features. The two sets of features are then concatenated to form the
resultant feature histogram. Experiments were performed on the CASME II and
SMIC databases. We demonstrate on both databases, the usefulness of optical
strain information and more importantly, that our best approaches are able to
outperform the original baseline results for both detection and recognition
tasks. A comparison of the proposed method with other existing spatio-temporal
feature extraction approaches is also presented.Comment: 21 pages (including references), single column format, accepted to
Signal Processing: Image Communication journa
Micro-expression recognition analysis using facial strain / Liong Sze Teng
Facial micro-expression analysis has attracted much attention from the computer vision and psychology communities due to its viability in a broad range of applications, including medical diagnosis, police interrogation, national security, business negotiation,
and social interactions. However, the micro and subtle occurrence that appears on the face poses a major challenge to the development of an efficient automated micro-expression recognition system. Therefore, to date, the annotation of the ground-truths (i.e., emotion label, onset, apex and offset frame indices) are still performed manually by psychologists or trained experts. This thesis briefly reviews the conventional automatic facial microexpression recognition methods and their related works. In general, an automatic facial micro-expression recognition system consists of three basic steps, namely: image preprocessing, feature extraction, and emotion classification. This thesis mainly focuses on the enhancement of the first two steps over conventional methods in the literature. Specifically, a hybrid facial regions selection for pre-processing is proposed. This method is able to eliminate some parts of the face that are irrelevant to any facial emotions. Then, an effective feature descriptor, namely, optical strain, is utilized to capture the variations in characteristics and properties of the micro-expressions in the video. Next, a feature descriptor is developed to encode the essential expressiveness of the apex frame because the information of a single apex frame exhibits the highest variation of motion intensity, which is adequate to represent the emotion of the entire video. Finally, this thesis is concluded by highlighting its contributions and limitations, as well as suggesting possible future directions related to micro-expression recognition system