An Improved Micro-Expression Recognition Method Based on Necessary Morphological Patches

Micro-expression is a spontaneous emotional representation that is not controlled by logic. A micro-expression is both transitory (short duration) and subtle (small intensity), so it is difficult to detect in people. Micro-expression detection is widely used in the fields of psychological analysis, criminal justice and human-computer interaction. Additionally, like traditional facial expressions, micro-expressions also have local muscle movement. Psychologists have shown micro-expressions have necessary morphological patches (NMPs), which are triggered by emotion. Furthermore, the objective of this paper is to sort and filter these NMPs and extract features from NMPs to train classifiers to recognize micro-expressions. Firstly, we use the optical flow method to compare the on-set frame and the apex frame of the micro-expression sequences. By doing this, we could find facial active patches. Secondly, to find the NMPs of micro-expressions, this study calculates the local binary pattern from three orthogonal planes (LBP-TOP) operators and cascades them with optical flow histograms to form the fusion features of the active patches. Finally, a random forest feature selection (RFFS) algorithm is used to identify the NMPs and to characterize them via support vector machine (SVM) classifier. We evaluated the proposed method on two popular publicly available databases: CASME II and SMIC. Results show that NMPs are statistically determined and contribute to significant discriminant ability instead of holistic utilization of all facial regions.