A Micro-Expression Recognition Network Based on Attention Mechanism and Motion Magnification

Micro-expressions (MEs) are spontaneous facial movements that reveal an individual’s genuine emotions and play a crucial role in various domains, including lie detection, criminal analysis, mental health treatment, national security, and others. Micro-expression recognition is a highly complex aspect within the domain of affective computing, aimed at identifying subtle facial motions that are difficult for humans to discern accurately. To model the subtle facial muscle motions and the brief duration of MEs, we propose a robust micro-expression recognition (MER) network, named the attention mechanism-based motion magnification guided micro-expression recognition network (AM-MM-MER). This network consists of two primary components: the ST-MEMM network, which enhances subtle motions in micro-expression videos to reveal imperceptible facial muscle motions, and the AM-MER, which focuses on facial landmarks related to micro-expressions and incorporates novel landmark positions to extract the underlying relationships among these landmarks, thereby reducing interference from video magnification and irrelevant identity features. Extensive analysis on the CASME II and SAMM datasets demonstrates the high accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed network, achieving superior results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies further illustrate the robustness of the proposed network.