Micro-expression recognition from local facial regions

Abstract MiE is a facial involuntary reaction that reflects the real emotion and thoughts of a human being. It is very difficult for a normal human to detect a Micro-Expression (MiE), since it is a very fast and local face reaction with low intensity. As a consequence, it is a challenging task for researchers to build an automatic system for MiE recognition. Previous works for MiE recognition have attempted to use the whole face, yet a facial MiE appears in a small region of the face, which makes the extraction of relevant features a hard task. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning approach that leverages the locality aspect of MiEs by learning spatio-temporal features from local facial regions using a composite architecture of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM). The proposed solution succeeds to extract relevant local features for MiEs recognition. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the highest recognition accuracy of our solution with respect to state-of-the-art methods.