Facial Micro-Expression Recognition Enhanced by Score Fusion and a Hybrid Model from Convolutional LSTM and Vision Transformer

In the billions of faces that are shaped by thousands of different cultures and ethnicities, one thing remains universal: the way emotions are expressed. To take the next step in human–machine interactions, a machine (e.g., a humanoid robot) must be able to clarify facial emotions. Allowing systems to recognize micro-expressions affords the machine a deeper dive into a person’s true feelings, which will take human emotion into account while making optimal decisions. For instance, these machines will be able to detect dangerous situations, alert caregivers to challenges, and provide appropriate responses. Micro-expressions are involuntary and transient facial expressions capable of revealing genuine emotions. We propose a new hybrid neural network (NN) model capable of micro-expression recognition in real-time applications. Several NN models are first compared in this study. Then, a hybrid NN model is created by combining a convolutional neural network (CNN), a recurrent neural network (RNN, e.g., long short-term memory (LSTM)), and a vision transformer. The CNN can extract spatial features (within a neighborhood of an image), whereas the LSTM can summarize temporal features. In addition, a transformer with an attention mechanism can capture sparse spatial relations residing in an image or between frames in a video clip. The inputs of the model are short facial videos, while the outputs are the micro-expressions recognized from the videos. The NN models are trained and tested with publicly available facial micro-expression datasets to recognize different micro-expressions (e.g., happiness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness). Score fusion and improvement metrics are also presented in our experiments. The results of our proposed models are compared with that of literature-reported methods tested on the same datasets. The proposed hybrid model performs the best, where score fusion can dramatically increase recognition performance.