# Shallow Triple Stream Three-dimensional CNN (STSTNet) for Micro-expression Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03634 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03634/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Learning for Micro-expression Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02823/) (2021)
- [Micron-BERT: BERT-based Facial Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03195/) (2023)
- [Feature refinement: An expression-specific feature learning and fusion method for micro-expression recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04838/) (2021)
- [HTNet for micro-expression recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14637/) (2023)
- [Short and Long Range Relation Based Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05851/) (2021)
- [MMNet: Muscle motion-guided network for micro-expression recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05297/) (2022)
- [Feature Representation Learning with Adaptive Displacement Generation and Transformer Fusion for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04420/) (2023)
- [Shallow Optical Flow Three-Stream CNN for Macro- and Micro-Expression Spotting from Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06489/) (2021)
- [DFME: A New Benchmark for Dynamic Facial Micro-expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00985/) (2023)
- [MOL: Joint Estimation of Micro-Expression, Optical Flow, and Landmark via Transformer-Graph-Style Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14511/) (2025)
- [Data Leakage and Evaluation Issues in Micro-Expression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11425/) (2022)
- [Facial Expression Analysis and Its Potentials in IoT Systems: A Contemporary Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17616/) (2024)
- [A comparative study on movement feature in different directions for micro-expression recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08068/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Approach for Facial Movement Based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01256/) (2021)
- [PosMLP-Video: Spatial and Temporal Relative Position Encoding for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02934/) (2024)
- [MPFNet: A Multi-Prior Fusion Network with a Progressive Training Strategy for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09735/) (2025)
- [Deep Insights of Learning based Micro Expression Recognition: A Perspective on Promises, Challenges and Research Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04935/) (2022)
- [Prior Information based Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01776/) (2023)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13653/) (2023)
- [MELLM: A Flow-Guided Large Language Model for Micro-Expression Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07007/) (2025)
- [FED-PsyAU: Privacy-Preserving Micro-Expression Recognition via Psychological AU Coordination and Dynamic Facial Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20557/) (2025)
- [Multi-scale multi-modal micro-expression recognition algorithm based on transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02969/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Latent Emotion Recognition from Micro-expression and Physiological Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12156/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Space-Time Attention for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03202/) (2024)
- [Micro-Expression Recognition by Motion Feature Extraction based on Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07345/) (2024)
- [Temporal and Spatial Feature Fusion Framework for Dynamic Micro Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16372/) (2025)
- [ME-TST+: Micro-expression Analysis via Temporal State Transition with ROI Relationship Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08082/) (2025)
- [Micro-Expression Recognition via Fine-Grained Dynamic Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06015/) (2025)
- [Region attention and graph embedding network for occlusion objective class-based micro-expression recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05904/) (2021)
- [A Dynamic 3D Spontaneous Micro-expression Database: Establishment and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00166/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the recent year, state-of-the-art for facial micro-expression recognition have been significantly advanced by deep neural networks. The robustness of deep learning has yielded promising performance beyond that of traditional handcrafted approaches. Most works in literature emphasized on increasing the depth of networks and employing highly complex objective functions to learn more features. In this paper, we design a Shallow Triple Stream Three-dimensional CNN (STSTNet) that is computationally light whilst capable of extracting discriminative high level features and details of micro-expressions. The network learns from three optical flow features (i.e., optical strain, horizontal and vertical optical flow fields) computed based on the onset and apex frames of each video. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed STSTNet, which obtained an unweighted average recall rate of 0.7605 and unweighted F1-score of 0.7353 on the composite database consisting of 442 samples from the SMIC, CASME II and SAMM databases.