Sujing Wang

Ying He, Su-Jing Wang, Jingting Li et al.

This paper presents baseline results for the Third Facial Micro-Expression Grand Challenge (MEGC 2020). Both macro- and micro-expression intervals in CAS(ME)$^2$ and SAMM Long Videos are spotted by employing the method of Main Directional Maximal Difference Analysis (MDMD). The MDMD method uses the magnitude maximal difference in the main direction of optical flow features to spot facial movements. The single-frame prediction results of the original MDMD method are post-processed into reasonable video intervals. The metric F1-scores of baseline results are evaluated: for CAS(ME)$^2$, the F1-scores are 0.1196 and 0.0082 for macro- and micro-expressions respectively, and the overall F1-score is 0.0376; for SAMM Long Videos, the F1-scores are 0.0629 and 0.0364 for macro- and micro-expressions respectively, and the overall F1-score is 0.0445. The baseline project codes are publicly available at https://github.com/HeyingGithub/Baseline-project-for-MEGC2020_spotting.

Xinqi Fan, Jingting Li, John See et al.

Facial micro-expressions (MEs) are involuntary movements of the face that occur spontaneously when a person experiences an emotion but attempts to suppress or repress the facial expression, typically found in a high-stakes environment. In recent years, substantial advancements have been made in the areas of ME recognition, spotting, and generation. However, conventional approaches that treat spotting and recognition as separate tasks are suboptimal, particularly for analyzing long-duration videos in realistic settings. Concurrently, the emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs) offers promising new avenues for enhancing ME analysis through their powerful multimodal reasoning capabilities. The ME grand challenge (MEGC) 2025 introduces two tasks that reflect these evolving research directions: (1) ME spot-then-recognize (ME-STR), which integrates ME spotting and subsequent recognition in a unified sequential pipeline; and (2) ME visual question answering (ME-VQA), which explores ME understanding through visual question answering, leveraging MLLMs or LVLMs to address diverse question types related to MEs. All participating algorithms are required to run on this test set and submit their results on a leaderboard. More details are available at https://megc2025.github.io.

Xianye Ben, Yi Ren, Junping Zhang et al.

Unlike the conventional facial expressions, micro-expressions are involuntary and transient facial expressions capable of revealing the genuine emotions that people attempt to hide. Therefore, they can provide important information in a broad range of applications such as lie detection, criminal detection, etc. Since micro-expressions are transient and of low intensity, however, their detection and recognition is difficult and relies heavily on expert experiences. Due to its intrinsic particularity and complexity, video-based micro-expression analysis is attractive but challenging, and has recently become an active area of research. Although there have been numerous developments in this area, thus far there has been no comprehensive survey that provides researchers with a systematic overview of these developments with a unified evaluation. Accordingly, in this survey paper, we first highlight the key differences between macro- and micro-expressions, then use these differences to guide our research survey of video-based micro-expression analysis in a cascaded structure, encompassing the neuropsychological basis, datasets, features, spotting algorithms, recognition algorithms, applications and evaluation of state-of-the-art approaches. For each aspect, the basic techniques, advanced developments and major challenges are addressed and discussed. Furthermore, after considering the limitations of existing micro-expression datasets, we present and release a new dataset - called micro-and-macro expression warehouse (MMEW) - containing more video samples and more labeled emotion types. We then perform a unified comparison of representative methods on CAS(ME)2 for spotting, and on MMEW and SAMM for recognition, respectively. Finally, some potential future research directions are explored and outlined.

Chuin Hong Yap, Moi Hoon Yap, Adrian K. Davison et al.

Facial expression spotting is the preliminary step for micro- and macro-expression analysis. The task of reliably spotting such expressions in video sequences is currently unsolved. The current best systems depend upon optical flow methods to extract regional motion features, before categorisation of that motion into a specific class of facial movement. Optical flow is susceptible to drift error, which introduces a serious problem for motions with long-term dependencies, such as high frame-rate macro-expression. We propose a purely deep learning solution which, rather than tracking frame differential motion, compares via a convolutional model, each frame with two temporally local reference frames. Reference frames are sampled according to calculated micro- and macro-expression duration. As baseline for MEGC2021 using leave-one-subject-out evaluation method, we show that our solution achieves F1-score of 0.105 in a high frame-rate (200 fps) SAMM long videos dataset (SAMM-LV) and is competitive in a low frame-rate (30 fps) (CAS(ME)2) dataset. On unseen MEGC2022 challenge dataset, the baseline results are 0.1176 on SAMM Challenge dataset, 0.1739 on CAS(ME)3 and overall performance of 0.1531 on both dataset.

Xiaohua Huang, Sujing Wang, Xin Liu et al.

Recently, there are increasing interests in inferring mirco-expression from facial image sequences. Due to subtle facial movement of micro-expressions, feature extraction has become an important and critical issue for spontaneous facial micro-expression recognition. Recent works usually used spatiotemporal local binary pattern for micro-expression analysis. However, the commonly used spatiotemporal local binary pattern considers dynamic texture information to represent face images while misses the shape attribute of face images. On the other hand, their works extracted the spatiotemporal features from the global face regions, which ignore the discriminative information between two micro-expression classes. The above-mentioned problems seriously limit the application of spatiotemporal local binary pattern on micro-expression recognition. In this paper, we propose a discriminative spatiotemporal local binary pattern based on an improved integral projection to resolve the problems of spatiotemporal local binary pattern for micro-expression recognition. Firstly, we develop an improved integral projection for preserving the shape attribute of micro-expressions. Furthermore, an improved integral projection is incorporated with local binary pattern operators across spatial and temporal domains. Specifically, we extract the novel spatiotemporal features incorporating shape attributes into spatiotemporal texture features. For increasing the discrimination of micro-expressions, we propose a new feature selection based on Laplacian method to extract the discriminative information for facial micro-expression recognition. Intensive experiments are conducted on three availably published micro-expression databases. We compare our method with the state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves promising performance for micro-expression recognition.