# Feature refinement: An expression-specific feature learning and fusion method for micro-expression recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04838 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04838/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [A Structured Self-attentive Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03130/) (2017)
- [Learning Actor Relation Graphs for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10117/) (2019)
- [OFF-ApexNet on Micro-expression Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08699/) (2018)
- [Shallow Triple Stream Three-dimensional CNN (STSTNet) for Micro-expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03634/) (2019)
- [Towards Reading Hidden Emotions: A comparative Study of Spontaneous Micro-expression Spotting and Recognition Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00423/) (2015)
- [Less is More: Micro-expression Recognition from Video using Apex Frame](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01721/) (2016)
- [Enriched Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network for Facial Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08417/) (2018)
- [Spatiotemporal Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Recognizing Spontaneous Micro-expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04656/) (2019)
- [LEARNet Dynamic Imaging Network for Micro Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09410/) (2019)
- [Spontaneous Facial Micro-Expression Recognition using 3D Spatiotemporal Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01390/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Automatic Facial Micro-expression Analysis: Databases, Methods and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05781/) (2018)
- [Cross-Database Micro-Expression Recognition: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07742/) (2018)
- [Sparsity in Dynamics of Spontaneous Subtle Emotions: Analysis & Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.04805/) (2016)
- [Evaluation of the Spatio-Temporal features and GAN for Micro-expression Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01748/) (2019)
- [A Novel Apex-Time Network for Cross-Dataset Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03699/) (2019)
- [Learning a Target Sample Re-Generator for Cross-Database Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08645/) (2017)
- [Spontaneous Subtle Expression Detection and Recognition based on Facial Strain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02792/) (2016)
- [Facial Micro-Expression Spotting and Recognition using Time Contrasted Feature with Visual Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03514/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [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)
- [HTNet for micro-expression recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14637/) (2023)
- [Feature Representation Learning with Adaptive Displacement Generation and Transformer Fusion for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04420/) (2023)
- [Data Leakage and Evaluation Issues in Micro-Expression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11425/) (2022)
- [Synergistic Spotting and Recognition of Micro-Expression via Temporal State Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09707/) (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)
- [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)
- [Rethinking Key-frame-based Micro-expression Recognition: A Robust and Accurate Framework Against Key-frame Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06640/) (2025)
- [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)
- [AMMSM: Adaptive Motion Magnification and Sparse Mamba for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24057/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Boosting Micro-Expression Analysis via Prior-Guided Video-Level Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18834/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of Super-resolution on Low-resolution Micro-expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10022/) (2023)
- [Three-Stream Temporal-Shift Attention Network Based on Self-Knowledge Distillation for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17538/) (2024)
- [AHMSA-Net: Adaptive Hierarchical Multi-Scale Attention Network for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02539/) (2025)
- [A Benchmark for Incremental Micro-expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19111/) (2025)
- [MMME: A Spontaneous Multi-Modal Micro-Expression Dataset Enabling Visual-Physiological Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09834/) (2025)
- [MPT: Motion Prompt Tuning for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09446/) (2025)
- [Micro-expression Recognition Based on Dual-branch Feature Extraction and Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23950/) (2026)
- [EPIR: An Efficient Patch Tokenization, Integration and Representation Framework for Micro-expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08106/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Micro-Expression Recognition has become challenging, as it is extremely difficult to extract the subtle facial changes of micro-expressions. Recently, several approaches proposed several expression-shared features algorithms for micro-expression recognition. However, they do not reveal the specific discriminative characteristics, which lead to sub-optimal performance. This paper proposes a novel Feature Refinement ({FR}) with expression-specific feature learning and fusion for micro-expression recognition. It aims to obtain salient and discriminative features for specific expressions and also predict expression by fusing the expression-specific features. FR consists of an expression proposal module with attention mechanism and a classification branch. First, an inception module is designed based on optical flow to obtain expression-shared features. Second, in order to extract salient and discriminative features for specific expression, expression-shared features are fed into an expression proposal module with attention factors and proposal loss. Last, in the classification branch, labels of categories are predicted by a fusion of the expression-specific features. Experiments on three publicly available databases validate the effectiveness of FR under different protocol. Results on public benchmarks demonstrate that our FR provides salient and discriminative information for micro-expression recognition. The results also show our FR achieves better or competitive performance with the existing state-of-the-art methods on micro-expression recognition.