Abstract—Facial micro-expressions play a pivotal role in human non-verbal emotional expression, so it can be used in many fields such as criminal interrogation, clinical diagnosis and animation. Conventional means are usually based on 2D image analysis means, which has shown its disadvantage in real applications. In this paper, a 3D-based facial micro-expression analysis method is firstly proposed. The 3D acquisition equipment based on high-speed structured light is established to capture dense and accurate 3D facial shapes with a maximum speed of 300Hz. Facial micro-expression detection method is put forward to extract the onset and offset of micro-expression sequence. Finally, a 4D descriptor is introduced to describe the timing characteristic of facial micro-expression. Experiments on real human faces are used to verify feasibility of the proposed system and method.

Index Terms—facial micro-expression, 3D facial expression, structured light, 3D reconstruction

Cite: Yuping Ye, Zhan Song, and Juan Zhao, "Facial Micro-expression Analysis via a High Speed Structured Light Sensing System," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 15-19, March 2021. doi: 10.18178/joig.9.1.15-19

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