# Micro-Expression Recognition by Motion Feature Extraction based on Pre-training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07345/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Learning-based Video Motion Magnification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02684/) (2018)
- [Shallow Triple Stream Three-dimensional CNN (STSTNet) for Micro-expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03634/) (2019)
- [Revealing the Invisible with Model and Data Shrinking for Composite-database Micro-expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09674/) (2020)
- [Enriched Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network for Facial Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08417/) (2018)
- [Feature refinement: An expression-specific feature learning and fusion method for micro-expression recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04838/) (2021)
- [Extended Local Binary Patterns for Efficient and Robust Spontaneous Facial Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09160/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MMME: A Spontaneous Multi-Modal Micro-Expression Dataset Enabling Visual-Physiological Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09834/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Micro-expressions (MEs) are spontaneous, unconscious facial expressions that have promising applications in various fields such as psychotherapy and national security. Thus, micro-expression recognition (MER) has attracted more and more attention from researchers. Although various MER methods have emerged especially with the development of deep learning techniques, the task still faces several challenges, e.g. subtle motion and limited training data. To address these problems, we propose a novel motion extraction strategy (MoExt) for the MER task and use additional macro-expression data in the pre-training process. We primarily pretrain the feature separator and motion extractor using the contrastive loss, thus enabling them to extract representative motion features. In MoExt, shape features and texture features are first extracted separately from onset and apex frames, and then motion features related to MEs are extracted based on the shape features of both frames. To enable the model to more effectively separate features, we utilize the extracted motion features and the texture features from the onset frame to reconstruct the apex frame. Through pre-training, the module is enabled to extract inter-frame motion features of facial expressions while excluding irrelevant information. The feature separator and motion extractor are ultimately integrated into the MER network, which is then fine-tuned using the target ME data. The effectiveness of proposed method is validated on three commonly used datasets, i.e., CASME II, SMIC, SAMM, and CAS(ME)3 dataset. The results show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.