# RealSmileNet: A Deep End-To-End Network for Spontaneous and Posed Smile Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03203 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03203/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Less is More: Facial Landmarks can Recognize a Spontaneous Smile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04240/) (2022)
- [Coupling deep and handcrafted features to assess smile genuineness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16128/) (2025)
- [HadaSmileNet: Hadamard fusion of handcrafted and deep-learning features for enhancing facial emotion recognition of genuine smiles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18550/) (2025)
- [Temporal Posed and Spontaneous Gesture Recognition from Electromyography in the Rock-Paper-Scissors Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29423/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Smiles play a vital role in the understanding of social interactions within different communities, and reveal the physical state of mind of people in both real and deceptive ways. Several methods have been proposed to recognize spontaneous and posed smiles. All follow a feature-engineering based pipeline requiring costly pre-processing steps such as manual annotation of face landmarks, tracking, segmentation of smile phases, and hand-crafted features. The resulting computation is expensive, and strongly dependent on pre-processing steps. We investigate an end-to-end deep learning model to address these problems, the first end-to-end model for spontaneous and posed smile recognition. Our fully automated model is fast and learns the feature extraction processes by training a series of convolution and ConvLSTM layer from scratch. Our experiments on four datasets demonstrate the robustness and generalization of the proposed model by achieving state-of-the-art performances.