Boosting Micro-Expression Recognition via Self-Expression Reconstruction and Memory Contrastive Learning

Micro-expression (ME) is an instinctive reaction that is not controlled by thoughts. It reveals one's inner feelings, which is significant in sentiment analysis and lie detection. Since micro-expression is expressed as subtle facial changes within particular facial action units, learning discriminative and generalized features for Micro-expression Recognition (MER) is challenging. To achieve the purpose, this paper proposes a novel MER framework that simultaneously integrates supervised Prototype-based Memory Contrastive Learning (PMCL) for discriminative feature mining and adds Self-expression Reconstruction (SER) as an auxiliary task and regularization for better generalization. In particular, the proposed SER module is forced as a regularization by reconstructing input ME from the randomly dropped patch-wise features in the bottleneck. And, the PMCL module globally compares historical and current cluster agents learned from training instances to enhance intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmarks, e.g., SMIC, CASME II, and SAMM, under evaluation criteria of both Composite Database Evaluation (CDE) and Single Database Evaluation (SDE) protocols. The results show our method surpasses other state-of-the-art approaches under various evaluation metrics, achieving overall 86.30% unweighed F1-score and 88.30% unweighed average recall on the composite dataset. Furthermore, the ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our SER for better generalization and PMCL for better discrimination in learning feature representation from limited micro-expression samples.