Micro-expression recognition with small sample size by transferring long-term convolutional neural network

Micro-expression is one of important clues for detecting lies. Its most outstanding characteristics include short duration and low intensity of movement. Therefore, video clips of high spatial-temporal resolution are much more desired than still images to provide sufficient details. On the other hand, owing to the difficulties to collect and encode micro-expression data, it is small sample size. In this paper, we use only 560 micro-expression video clips to evaluate the proposed network model: Transferring Long-term Convolutional Neural Network (TLCNN). TLCNN uses Deep CNN to extract features from each frame of micro-expression video clips, then feeds them to Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) which learn the temporal sequence information of micro-expression. Due to the small sample size of micro-expression data, TLCNN uses two steps of transfer learning: (1) transferring from expression data and (2) transferring from single frame of micro-expression video clips, which can be regarded as big data. Evaluation on 560 micro-expression video clips collected from three spontaneous databases is performed. The results show that the proposed TLCNN is better than some state-of-the-art algorithms. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.