Facial Micro-Expression Recognition Using Spatiotemporal Local Binary Pattern with Integral Projection

Abstract

Recently, there are increasing interests in inferring mirco-expression from facial image sequences. For micro-expression recognition, feature extraction is an important critical issue. In this paper, we proposes a novel framework based on a new spatiotemporal facial representation to analyze micro-expressions with subtle facial movement. Firstly, an integral projection method based on difference images is utilized for obtaining horizontal and vertical projection, which can preserve the shape attributes of facial images and increase the discrimination for micro-expressions. Furthermore, we employ the local binary pattern operators to extract the appearance and motion features on horizontal and vertical projections. Intensive experiments are conducted on three available published micro-expression databases for evaluating the performance of the method. Experimental results demonstrate that the new spatiotemporal descriptor can achieve promising performance in micro-expression recognition.