# iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00285/

## Key facts

- Cited by 63 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 101 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [Can Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs Retrace the History of 2D CNNs and ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09577/) (2017)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Spatiotemporal Feature Learning: Speed-Accuracy Trade-offs in Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04851/) (2017)
- [Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4389/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Video Representations using LSTMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.04681/) (2015)
- [Convolutional Two-Stream Network Fusion for Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06573/) (2016)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [Temporal Relational Reasoning in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08496/) (2017)
- [Video Classification with Channel-Separated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02811/) (2019)
- [Temporal Segment Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02953/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Sorting Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01246/) (2017)
- [Deep Affect Prediction in-the-wild: Aff-Wild Database and Challenge, Deep Architectures, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10938/) (2018)
- [Moments in Time Dataset: one million videos for event understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03150/) (2018)
- [An Attention Enhanced Graph Convolutional LSTM Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09130/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning with Space-Time Cubic Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09795/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal LSTM with Trust Gates for 3D Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07043/) (2016)
- [Independently Recurrent Neural Network (IndRNN): Building A Longer and Deeper RNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04831/) (2018)
- [An End-to-End Spatio-Temporal Attention Model for Human Action Recognition from Skeleton Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06067/) (2016)
- [View Adaptive Recurrent Neural Networks for High Performance Human Action Recognition from Skeleton Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08274/) (2017)
- [Self-supervised Spatio-temporal Representation Learning for Videos by Predicting Motion and Appearance Statistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03597/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [One-Stage 3D Whole-Body Mesh Recovery with Component Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16160/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Micro-action Recognition: Dataset, Methods, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05234/) (2024)
- [Context De-confounded Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11921/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Useful LLM Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00936/) (2024)
- [EMO-LLaMA: Enhancing Facial Emotion Understanding with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11424/) (2024)
- [Joint Skeletal and Semantic Embedding Loss for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10624/) (2023)
- [GPT as Psychologist? Preliminary Evaluations for GPT-4V on Visual Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05916/) (2024)
- [Prototypical Calibrating Ambiguous Samples for Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14719/) (2024)
- [MMAD: Multi-label Micro-Action Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05311/) (2024)
- [Bodily Behaviors in Social Interaction: Novel Annotations and State-of-the-Art Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12817/) (2022)
- [Micro-gesture Online Recognition using Learnable Query Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04490/) (2024)
- [Prototype Learning for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03097/) (2024)
- [Spatiotemporal Decouple-and-Squeeze Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02316/) (2023)
- [Multi-scale Promoted Self-adjusting Correlation Learning for Facial Action Unit Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07770/) (2023)
- [MM-Gesture: Towards Precise Micro-Gesture Recognition through Multimodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08344/) (2025)
- [Unlocking the Emotional World of Visual Media: An Overview of the Science, Research, and Impact of Understanding Emotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13463/) (2023)
- [Towards Online Multi-Modal Social Interaction Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19851/) (2025)
- [Towards Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Debiasing from a Causal Demystification Perspective via De-confounded Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04963/) (2024)
- [SocialGesture: Delving into Multi-person Gesture Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02244/) (2025)
- [Online Micro-gesture Recognition Using Data Augmentation and Spatial-Temporal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09512/) (2025)
- [Motion Matters: Motion-guided Modulation Network for Skeleton-based Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21977/) (2025)
- [EmpathicStories++: A Multimodal Dataset for Empathy towards Personal Experiences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15708/) (2024)
- [StepNet: Spatial-temporal Part-aware Network for Isolated Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12857/) (2022)
- [MA-Bench: Towards Fine-grained Micro-Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26586/) (2026)
- [EALD-MLLM: Emotion Analysis in Long-sequential and De-identity videos with Multi-modal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00574/) (2024)
- [Identity-free Artificial Emotional Intelligence via Micro-Gesture Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13206/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Micro Gesture Recognition for Emotion Understanding via Context-aware Visual-Text Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01885/) (2024)
- [Affective Video Content Analysis: Decade Review and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17212/) (2023)
- [Affective Visual Dialog: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Emotional Reasoning Based on Visually Grounded Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16349/) (2023)
- [NatSGD: A Dataset with Speech, Gestures, and Demonstrations for Robot Learning in Natural Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02274/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a new dataset for the emotional artificial intelligence research: identity-free video dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion analysis (iMiGUE). Different from existing public datasets, iMiGUE focuses on nonverbal body gestures without using any identity information, while the predominant researches of emotion analysis concern sensitive biometric data, like face and speech. Most importantly, iMiGUE focuses on micro-gestures, i.e., unintentional behaviors driven by inner feelings, which are different from ordinary scope of gestures from other gesture datasets which are mostly intentionally performed for illustrative purposes. Furthermore, iMiGUE is designed to evaluate the ability of models to analyze the emotional states by integrating information of recognized micro-gesture, rather than just recognizing prototypes in the sequences separately (or isolatedly). This is because the real need for emotion AI is to understand the emotional states behind gestures in a holistic way. Moreover, to counter for the challenge of imbalanced sample distribution of this dataset, an unsupervised learning method is proposed to capture latent representations from the micro-gesture sequences themselves. We systematically investigate representative methods on this dataset, and comprehensive experimental results reveal several interesting insights from the iMiGUE, e.g., micro-gesture-based analysis can promote emotion understanding. We confirm that the new iMiGUE dataset could advance studies of micro-gesture and emotion AI.