Micro-expression recognition using advanced genetic algorithm

Abstract In recent years, numerous facial expression recognition related applications had been commercialized in the market. Many of them achieved promising and reliable performance results in real-world applications. In contrast, the automated micro-expression recognition system relevant research analysis is still greatly lacking. This is because of the nature of the micro-expression that is usually appeared with relatively lesser duration and lower intensity. However, due to its uncontrollable, subtlety, and spontaneity properties, it is capable to reveal one’s concealed genuine feelings. Therefore, this paper attempts to improve the performance of current micro-expression recognition systems by introducing an efficient and effective algorithm. Particularly, we employ genetic algorithms (GA) to discover an optimal solution in order to facilitate the computational process in producing better recognition results. Prior to the GA implementation, the benchmark preprocessing method and feature extractors are directly adopted herein. Succinctly, the complete proposed framework composes three main steps: the apex frame acquisition, optical flow approximation, and feature extraction with CNN architecture. Experiments were conducted on the composite dataset that is made up of three publicly available databases, viz, CASME II, SMIC, and SAMM. The recognition performance tends to prevail the state-of-the-art methods by attaining an accuracy of 85.9% and F1-score of 83.7%.