MER-GCN: Micro-Expression Recognition Based on Relation Modeling with Graph Convolutional Networks

Abstract

Micro-Expression (ME) is the spontaneous, involuntary movement of a face that can reveal the true feeling. Recently, increasing researches have paid attention to this field combing deep learning techniques. Action units (AUs) are the fundamental actions reflecting the facial muscle movements and AU detection has been adopted by many researches to classify facial expressions. However, the time-consuming annotation process makes it difficult to correlate the combinations of AUs to specific emotion classes. Inspired by the nodes relationship building Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), we propose an end-to-end AU-oriented graph classification network, namely MER-GCN, which uses 3D ConvNets to extract AU features and applies GCN layers to discover the dependency laying between AU nodes for ME categorization. To our best knowl-edge, this work is the first end-to-end architecture for Micro-Expression Recognition (MER) using AUs based GCN. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms CNN-based MER networks.