A Spontaneous Micro-expression Database: Inducement, collection and baseline

Micro-expressions are short, involuntary facial expressions which reveal hidden emotions. Micro-expressions are important for understanding humans' deceitful behavior. Psychologists have been studying them since the 1960's. Currently the attention is elevated in both academic fields and in media. However, while general facial expression recognition (FER) has been intensively studied for years in computer vision, little research has been done in automatically analyzing micro-expressions. The biggest obstacle to date has been the lack of a suitable database. In this paper we present a novel Spontaneous Micro-expression Database SMIC, which includes 164 micro-expression video clips elicited from 16 participants. Micro-expression detection and recognition performance are provided as baselines. SMIC provides sufficient source material for comprehensive testing of automatic systems for analyzing micro-expressions, which has not been possible with any previously published database.