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Micro-expression recognition based on SqueezeNet and C3D

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Abstract

Micro-expression recognition has attracted extensive attention from psychological and computer vision communities due to its multiple real-life applications. Compared with macro-expression, the change of micro-expression is subtle and difficult for detection and capture. Hence, the recognition is challenging. This paper proposes a micro-expression recognition model SQU-C3D which combines SqueezeNet and C3D methods. The features of micro-expression are mainly reflected in the apex frame, therefore a lightweight network called SqueezeNet is adopted to implement a reliable apex frame spotting method for dataset without apex frame labels. The position of the apex frame is detected by comparing the feature difference between the current and onset frames. In addition, the Convolutional 3D (C3D) network is utilized for micro-expression recognition due to its strong capability of extracting spatial–temporal features. The apex frame determined by SqueezeNet is fed into the C3D network along with the onset and offset frames, and the micro-expression is recognized by learning the features of these three key frames. Extensive experiments are conducted on three spontaneous micro-expression databases, namely, CASME II, SAMM, and SMIC-HS, where CASME II and SAMM include apex frame labels, whereas SMIC-HS does not. SQU-C3D achieves accuracy of 80.29% with 7 classes, 81.33% with 5 classes and 79.12% with 3 classes on the micro-expression benchmark dataset of CASME II, SAMM and SMIC-HS, respectively. Experimental results reveal that the proposed framework performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in the comparison.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported partially by the project of Jilin Provincial Science and Technology Department under the Grant 20180201003GX and the project of Jilin province development and reform commission under the Grant 2019C053-4.The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of the reviewers, which have improved the presentation.

Funding

This research was funded by the project of Jilin Provincial Science and Technology Department under the Grant 20180201003GX and the APC was funded by Grant 20180201003GX too.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Technology, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China

    Shuhua Liu, Yushu Ren, Lanting Li & Xiaoyu Sun

  2. School of Computer Science, Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun, China

    Yu Song

  3. Center for Machine Vision and Security Research, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, USA

    Chih-Cheng Hung

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  1. Shuhua Liu
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  2. Yushu Ren
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Contributions

This study was completed by the co-authors. SL conceived the research and wrote the draft. The major experiments and analyses were undertaken by YR and YS. LL and XS were responsible for data processing and drawing figures. C-CH edited and reviewed the paper. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Chih-Cheng Hung.

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Communicated by I. Bartolini.

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Liu, S., Ren, Y., Li, L. et al. Micro-expression recognition based on SqueezeNet and C3D. Multimedia Systems 28, 2227–2236 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-022-00949-z

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