Micro-Expression Recognition Based on Optical Flow and PCANet

Micro-expressions are rapid and subtle facial movements. Different from ordinary facial expressions in our daily life, micro-expressions are very difficult to detect and recognize. In recent years, due to a wide range of potential applications in many domains, micro-expression recognition has aroused extensive attention from computer vision. Because available micro-expression datasets are very small, deep neural network models with a huge number of parameters are prone to over-fitting. In this article, we propose an OF-PCANet+ method for micro-expression recognition, in which we design a spatiotemporal feature learning strategy based on shallow PCANet+ model, and we incorporate optical flow sequence stacking with the PCANet+ network to learn discriminative spatiotemporal features. We conduct comprehensive experiments on publicly available SMIC and CASME2 datasets. The results show that our lightweight model obviously outperforms popular hand-crafted methods and also achieves comparable performances with deep learning based methods, such as 3D-FCNN and ELRCN.