Discriminative Spatiotemporal Local Binary Pattern with Revisited Integral Projection for Spontaneous Facial Micro-Expression Recognition

Abstract

Recently, there have been increasing interests in inferring mirco-expression from facial image sequences. Due to subtle facial movement of micro-expressions, feature extraction has become an important and critical issue for spontaneous facial micro-expression recognition. Recent works used spatiotemporal local binary pattern (STLBP) for micro-expression recognition and considered dynamic texture information to represent face images. However, they miss the shape attribute of face images. On the other hand, they extract the spatiotemporal features from the global face regions while ignore the discriminative information between two micro-expression classes. The above-mentioned problems seriously limit the application of STLBP to micro-expression recognition. In this paper, we propose a discriminative spatiotemporal local binary pattern based on an integral projection to resolve the problems of STLBP for micro-expression recognition. First, we revisit an integral projection for preserving the shape attribute of micro-expressions by using robust principal component analysis. Furthermore, a revisited integral projection is incorporated with local binary pattern across spatial and temporal domains. Specifically, we extract the novel spatiotemporal features incorporating shape attributes into spatiotemporal texture features. For increasing the discrimination of micro-expressions, we propose a new feature selection based on Laplacian method to extract the discriminative information for facial micro-expression recognition. Intensive experiments are conducted on three availably published micro-expression databases including CASME, CASME2 and SMIC databases. We compare our method with the state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves promising performance for micro-expression recognition.