Recognising Spontaneous Facial Micro-expressions

Facial micro-expressions are rapid involuntary facial expressions which reveal suppressed affect. To the best knowledge of the authors, there is no previous work that successfully recognises spontaneous facial micro-expressions. In this paper we show how a temporal interpolation model together with the first comprehensive spontaneous microexpression corpus enable us to accurately recognise these very short expressions. We designed an induced emotion suppression experiment to collect the new corpus using a high-speed camera. The system is the first to recognise spontaneous facial micro-expressions and achieves very promising results that compare favourably with the human micro-expression detection accuracy.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Tomas Pfister, Xiaobai Li, Guoying Zhao, Matti Pietikäinen
• Keywords: Computer Vision, Emotion, Facial Expressions, ICCV 2011, Interpolation