From Pixels to Semantics: Unified Facial Action Representation Learning for Micro-Expression Analysis

概要

Micro-expression recognition (MER) is highly challenging due to the subtle and rapid facial muscle movements and the scarcity of annotated data. Existing methods typically rely on pixel-level motion descriptors such as optical flow and frame difference, which tend to be sensitive to identity and lack generalization. In this work, we propose D-FACE, a Discrete Facial ACtion Encoding framework that leverages large-scale facial video data to pretrain an identity- and domain-invariant facial action tokenizer, for MER. For the first time, MER is shifted from relying on pixel-level motion descriptors to leveraging semantic-level facial action tokens, providing compact and generalizable representations of facial dynamics. Empirical analyses reveal that these tokens exhibit position-dependent semantics, motivating sequential modeling. Building on this insight, we employ a Transformer with sparse attention pooling to selectively capture discriminative action cues. Furthermore, to explicitly bridge action tokens with human-understandable emotions, we introduce an emotion-description-guided CLIP (EDCLIP) alignment. EDCLIP leverages textual prompts as semantic anchors for representation learning, while enforcing that the others category, which lacks corresponding prompts due to its ambiguity, remains distant from all anchor prompts. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method achieves not only state-of-the-art recognition accuracy but also high-quality cross-identity and even cross-domain micro-expression generation, suggesting a paradigm shift from pixel-level to generalizable semantic-level facial motion analysis.

Yicheng Deng

博士後期課程学生

早志英朗

准教授

深層学習やベイズ推定を基盤とした機械学習アルゴリズムの開発を中心に、生体信号解析、医用画像処理などの応用研究に従事。

長原一

教授

コンピューテーショナルフォトグラフィ、コンピュータビジョンを専門とし実世界センシングや情報処理技術、画像認識技術の研究を行う。さらに、画像センシングにとどまらず様々なセンサに拡張したコンピュテーショナルセンシング手法の開発や高次元で冗長な実世界ビッグデータから意味のある情報を計測するスパースセンシングへの転換を目指す。