Objective Micro-Facial Movement Detection Using FACS-Based Regions and Baseline Evaluation

Micro-facial expressions are regarded as an important human behavioural event that can highlight emotional deception. Spotting these movements is difficult for humans and machines, however research into using computer vision to detect subtle facial expressions is growing in popularity. This paper proposes an individualised baseline micro-movement detection method using 3D Histogram of Oriented Gradients (3D HOG) temporal difference method. We define a face template consisting of 26 regions based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). We extract the temporal features of each region using 3D HOG. Then, we use Chi-square distance to find subtle facial motion in the local regions. Finally, an automatic peak detector is used to detect micro-movements above the proposed adaptive baseline threshold. The performance is validated on two FACS coded datasets: SAMM and CASME II. This objective method focuses on the movement of the 26 face regions. When comparing with the ground truth, the best result was an AUC of 0.7512 and 0.7261 on SAMM and CASME II, respectively. The results show that 3D HOG outperformed for micro-movement detection, compared to state-of-the-art feature representations: Local Binary Patterns in Three Orthogonal Planes and Histograms of Oriented Optical Flow.