Spontaneous Facial Micro-expression Recognition via Deep Convolutional Network

The automatic recognition of spontaneous facial micro-expressions becomes prevalent as it reveals the actual emotion of humans. However, handcrafted features employed for recognizing micro-expressions are designed for general applications and thus cannot well capture the subtle facial deformations of micro-expressions. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework to suit the particular needs of micro-expression recognition (MER). In the deep model, re- current convolutional networks are utilized to learn the representation of subtle changes from image sequences. To guarantee the learning of deep model, we present a temporal jittering procedure to greatly enrich the training samples. Through performing the experiments on three spontaneous micro-expression datasets, i.e., SMIC, CASME, and CASME2, we verify the effectiveness of our proposed MER approach.