Sai Prasanna Teja Reddy

Viswanatha Reddy Gajjala, Sai Prasanna Teja Reddy, Snehasis Mukherjee et al.

Micro-expression has emerged as a promising modality in affective computing due to its high objectivity in emotion detection. Despite the higher recognition accuracy provided by the deep learning models, there are still significant scope for improvements in micro-expression recognition techniques. The presence of micro-expressions in small-local regions of the face, as well as the limited size of available databases, continue to limit the accuracy in recognizing micro-expressions. In this work, we propose a facial micro-expression recognition model using 3D residual attention network named MERANet to tackle such challenges. The proposed model takes advantage of spatial-temporal attention and channel attention together, to learn deeper fine-grained subtle features for classification of emotions. Further, the proposed model encompasses both spatial and temporal information simultaneously using the 3D kernels and residual connections. Moreover, the channel features and spatio-temporal features are re-calibrated using the channel and spatio-temporal attentions, respectively in each residual module. Our attention mechanism enables the model to learn to focus on different facial areas of interest. The experiments are conducted on benchmark facial micro-expression datasets. A superior performance is observed as compared to the state-of-the-art for facial micro-expression recognition on benchmark data.

Sai Prasanna Teja Reddy, Surya Teja Karri, Shiv Ram Dubey et al.

Facial expression recognition in videos is an active area of research in computer vision. However, fake facial expressions are difficult to be recognized even by humans. On the other hand, facial micro-expressions generally represent the actual emotion of a person, as it is a spontaneous reaction expressed through human face. Despite of a few attempts made for recognizing micro-expressions, still the problem is far from being a solved problem, which is depicted by the poor rate of accuracy shown by the state-of-the-art methods. A few CNN based approaches are found in the literature to recognize micro-facial expressions from still images. Whereas, a spontaneous micro-expression video contains multiple frames that have to be processed together to encode both spatial and temporal information. This paper proposes two 3D-CNN methods: MicroExpSTCNN and MicroExpFuseNet, for spontaneous facial micro-expression recognition by exploiting the spatiotemporal information in CNN framework. The MicroExpSTCNN considers the full spatial information, whereas the MicroExpFuseNet is based on the 3D-CNN feature fusion of the eyes and mouth regions. The experiments are performed over CAS(ME)^2 and SMIC micro-expression databases. The proposed MicroExpSTCNN model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.