SL-Swin: A Transformer-Based Deep Learning Approach for Macro- and Micro-Expression Spotting on Small-Size Expression Datasets

Abstract

In recent years, the analysis of macro- and micro-expression has drawn the attention of researchers. These expressions provide visual cues to an individual’s emotions, which can be used in a broad range of potential applications such as lie detection and policing. In this paper, we address the challenge of spotting facial macro- and micro-expression from videos and present compelling results by using a deep learning approach to analyze the optical flow features. Unlike other deep learning approaches that are mainly based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we propose a Transformer-based deep learning approach that predicts a score indicating the probability of a frame being within an expression interval. In contrast to other Transformer-based models that achieve high performance by being pre-trained on large datasets, our deep learning model, called SL-Swin, which incorporates Shifted Patch Tokenization and Locality Self-Attention into the backbone Swin Transformer network, effectively spots macro- and micro-expressions by being trained from scratch on small-size expression datasets. Our evaluation outcomes surpass the MEGC 2022 spotting baseline result, obtaining an overall F1-score of 0.1366. Additionally, our approach performs well on the MEGC 2021 spotting task, with an overall F1-score of 0.1824 and 0.1357 on the CAS(ME)2 and SAMM Long Videos, respectively. The code is publicly available on GitHub.