In this paper, we develop a new method that recognizes facial expressions, on the basis of an innovative local motion patterns feature, with three main contributions. The first one is the analysis of the face skin temporal elasticity and face deformations during expression. The second one is a unified approach for both macro and micro expression recognition. And, the third one is the step forward towards in-the-wild expression recognition, dealing with challenges such as various intensity and various expression activation patterns, illumination variation and small head pose variations. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for micro expression recognition and positions itself among top-rank state-of-the-art methods for macro expression recognition.
Dynamic texture approaches are best suited to low facial motion amplitudes @cite_22 . Specifically, methods based on optical flow appear to be promising for micro expression analysis @cite_27 . Moreover, optical flow approach obtains competitive results in both macro and micro expression analysis @cite_38 . However, the optical flow approaches are often criticized for being heavily impacted by the presence of motion discontinuities and illumination changes. Recent optical flow algorithms (i.e. @cite_40 ) evolved to better deal with noise. The majority of these algorithms is based on complex filtering and smooth propagation of motion to reduce the discontinuity of local motion, improving the quality of optical flow. Still, in presence of high and low intensity of motion, the smoothing effect tends to induce false motion. Another technique consists of artificially amplifying the motion. This technique is being used increasingly and successfully in micro expression recognition @cite_0 . The main disadvantage is the requirement of high intensity facial deformation in order to be efficient. Such deformations alter significantly the facial morphology, especially in the presence of macro expression.
@cite_38 @cite_22 @cite_0 @cite_27 @cite_40
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This paper presents a novel method for automatic spotting (temporal segmentation) of facial expressions in long videos comprising of continuous and changing expressions. The method utilizes the strain impacted on the facial skin due to the non-rigid motion caused during expressions. The strain magnitude is calculated using the central difference method over the robust and dense optical flow field of each subjects face. Testing has been done on 2 datasets (which includes 100 macro-expressions) and promising results have been obtained. The method is robust to several common drawbacks found in automatic facial expression segmentation including moderate in-plane and out-of-plane motion. Additionally, the method has also been modified to work with videos containing micro-expressions. Micro-expressions are detected utilizing their smaller spatial and temporal extent. A subject's face is divided in to sub-regions (mouth, cheeks, forehead, and eyes) and facial strain is calculated for each of these regions. Strain patterns in individual regions are used to identify subtle changes which facilitate the detection of micro-expressions. Recently, there are increasing interests in inferring mirco-expression from facial image sequences. Due to subtle facial movement of micro-expressions, feature extraction has become an important and critical issue for spontaneous facial micro-expression recognition. Recent works usually used spatiotemporal local binary pattern for micro-expression analysis. However, the commonly used spatiotemporal local binary pattern considers dynamic texture information to represent face images while misses the shape attribute of face images. On the other hand, their works extracted the spatiotemporal features from the global face regions, which ignore the discriminative information between two micro-expression classes. The above-mentioned problems seriously limit the application of spatiotemporal local binary pattern on micro-expression recognition. In this paper, we propose a discriminative spatiotemporal local binary pattern based on an improved integral projection to resolve the problems of spatiotemporal local binary pattern for micro-expression recognition. Firstly, we develop an improved integral projection for preserving the shape attribute of micro-expressions. Furthermore, an improved integral projection is incorporated with local binary pattern operators across spatial and temporal domains. Specifically, we extract the novel spatiotemporal features incorporating shape attributes into spatiotemporal texture features. For increasing the discrimination of micro-expressions, we propose a new feature selection based on Laplacian method to extract the discriminative information for facial micro-expression recognition. Intensive experiments are conducted on three availably published micro-expression databases. We compare our method with the state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves promising performance for micro-expression recognition. Micro-expressions are brief facial movements characterized by short duration, involuntariness and low intensity. Recognition of spontaneous facial micro-expressions is a great challenge. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Main Directional Mean Optical-flow (MDMO) feature for micro-expression recognition. We apply a robust optical flow method on micro-expression video clips and partition the facial area into regions of interest (ROIs) based partially on action units. The MDMO is a ROI-based, normalized statistic feature that considers both local statistic motion information and its spatial location. One of the significant characteristics of MDMO is that its feature dimension is small. The length of a MDMO feature vector is @math , where @math is the number of ROIs. Furthermore, to reduce the influence of noise due to head movements, we propose an optical-flow-driven method to align all frames of a micro-expression video clip. Finally, a SVM classifier with the proposed MDMO feature is adopted for micro-expression recognition. Experimental results on three spontaneous micro-expression databases, namely SMIC, CASME and CASME II, show that the MDMO can achieve better performance than two state-of-the-art baseline features, i.e., LBP-TOP and HOOF. Spontaneous facial micro-expression analysis has become an active task for recognizing suppressed and involuntary facial expressions shown on the face of humans. Recently, Local Binary Pattern from Three Orthogonal Planes (LBP-TOP) has been employed for micro-expression analysis. However, LBP-TOP suffers from two critical problems, causing a decrease in the performance of micro-expression analysis. It generally extracts appearance and motion features from the sign-based difference between two pixels but not yet considers other useful information. As well, LBP-TOP commonly uses classical pattern types which may be not optimal for local structure in some applications. This paper proposes SpatioTemporal Completed Local Quantization Patterns (STCLQP) for facial micro-expression analysis. Firstly, STCLQP extracts three interesting information containing sign, magnitude and orientation components. Secondly, an efficient vector quantization and codebook selection are developed for each component in appearance and temporal domains to learn compact and discriminative codebooks for generalizing classical pattern types. Finally, based on discriminative codebooks, spatiotemporal features of sign, magnitude and orientation components are extracted and fused. Experiments are conducted on three publicly available facial micro-expression databases. Some interesting findings about the neighboring patterns and the component analysis are concluded. Comparing with the state of the art, experimental results demonstrate that STCLQP achieves a substantial improvement for analyzing facial micro-expressions. HighlightsWe propose spatiotemporal completed local quantized pattern for micro-expression analysis.We propose to use three useful information, including the sign-based, magnitude-based and orientation-based difference of pixels for LBP.We propose to use an efficient vector quantization and discriminative codebook selection to make LBP-TOP more discriminative and compact.We evaluate the framework on three publicly available facial micro-expression databases.We evaluate the influence of parameters, different components and codebook selection to spatiotemporal completed local quantized pattern.