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.
 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 (MEs) are rapid, involuntary facial expressions which reveal emotions that people do not intend to show. Studying MEs is valuable as recognizing them has many important applications, particularly in forensic science and psychotherapy. However, analyzing spontaneous MEs is very challenging due to their short duration and low intensity. Automatic ME analysis includes two tasks: ME spotting and ME recognition.For ME spotting, previous studies have focused on posed rather than spontaneous videos. For ME recognition, the performance of previous studies is low. To address these challenges, we make the following contributions: (i) We propose the first method for spotting spontaneous MEs in long videos (by exploiting feature difference contrast). This method is training free and works on arbitrary unseen videos. (ii) We present an advanced ME recognition framework, which outperforms previous work by a large margin on two challenging spontaneous ME databases (SMIC and CASMEII). (iii) We propose the first automatic ME analysis system (MESR), which can spot and recognize MEs from spontaneous video data. Finally, we show that our method achieves comparable performance to humans at this very challenging task, and outperforms humans in the ME recognition task by a large margin. 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. We propose a novel approach for optical flow estimation, targeted at large displacements with significant occlusions. It consists of two steps: i) dense matching by edge-preserving interpolation from a sparse set of matches; ii) variational energy minimization initialized with the dense matches. The sparse-to-dense interpolation relies on an appropriate choice of the distance, namely an edge-aware geodesic distance. This distance is tailored to handle occlusions and motion boundaries - two common and difficult issues for optical flow computation. We also propose an approximation scheme for the geodesic distance to allow fast computation without loss of performance. Subsequent to the dense interpolation step, standard one-level variational energy minimization is carried out on the dense matches to obtain the final flow estimation. The proposed approach, called Edge-Preserving Interpolation of Correspondences (EpicFlow) is fast and robust to large displacements. It significantly outperforms the state of the art on MPI-Sintel and performs on par on Kitti and Middlebury.