A Novel Micro-Expression Recognition Approach Using Attention-Based Magnification-Adaptive Networks

Micro-Expression recognition (MER) is a challenging task due to the short duration and low intensity of Micro-Expressions. A popular method to tackle this is magnifying MEs so as to enlarge the expression intensity to make recognition easier. However, the single fixed magnification strategy, widely used in existing works of MER, is not appropriate for different subjects, because each subject has specific expression intensity corresponding to different MEs. To cope with this issue, we propose a novel Attention-based Magnification-Adaptive Network (AMAN) to learn adaptive magnification levels for the ME representation. The network consists of two modules: magnification attention (MA module) to adaptively focus on appropriate magnification levels of different MEs, and frame attention (FA module) to focus on discriminative aggregated frames in a ME video. Extensive experiments on three widely used databases manifest that our method yields state-of-art results compared with other methods.