Domain Regeneration for Cross-Database Micro-Expression Recognition

Recently, micro-expression recognition has attracted lots of researchers’ attention due to its potential value in many practical applications, e.g., lie detection. In this paper, we investigate an interesting and challenging problem in micro-expression recognition, i.e., cross-database micro-expression recognition, in which the training and testing samples come from different micro-expression databases. Under this problem setting, the consistent feature distribution between the training and testing samples originally existing in conventional micro-expression recognition would be seriously broken, and hence, the performance of most current well-performing micro-expression recognition methods may sharply drop. In order to overcome it, we propose a simple yet effective framework called domain regeneration (DR) in this paper. The DR framework aims at learning a domain regenerator to regenerate the micro-expression samples from source and target databases, respectively, such that they can abide by the same or similar feature distributions. Thus, we are able to use the classifier learned based on the labeled source micro-expression samples to predict the label information of the unlabeled target micro-expression samples. To evaluate the proposed DR framework, we conduct extensive cross-database micro-expression recognition experiments designed based on the Spontaneous Micro-Expression Database and Chinese Academy of Sciences Micro-Expression II Database. Experimental results show that compared with the recent state-of-the-art cross-database emotion recognition methods, the proposed DR framework has more promising performance.