PLoS ONE (Jan 2014)

CASME II: an improved spontaneous micro-expression database and the baseline evaluation.

  • Wen-Jing Yan,
  • Xiaobai Li,
  • Su-Jing Wang,
  • Guoying Zhao,
  • Yong-Jin Liu,
  • Yu-Hsin Chen,
  • Xiaolan Fu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0086041
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 1
p. e86041

Abstract

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A robust automatic micro-expression recognition system would have broad applications in national safety, police interrogation, and clinical diagnosis. Developing such a system requires high quality databases with sufficient training samples which are currently not available. We reviewed the previously developed micro-expression databases and built an improved one (CASME II), with higher temporal resolution (200 fps) and spatial resolution (about 280×340 pixels on facial area). We elicited participants' facial expressions in a well-controlled laboratory environment and proper illumination (such as removing light flickering). Among nearly 3000 facial movements, 247 micro-expressions were selected for the database with action units (AUs) and emotions labeled. For baseline evaluation, LBP-TOP and SVM were employed respectively for feature extraction and classifier with the leave-one-subject-out cross-validation method. The best performance is 63.41% for 5-class classification.