Causal-Ex: Causal Graph-based Micro and Macro Expression Spotting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tan, Pei-Sze, Rajanala, Sailaja, Pal, Arghya, Phan, Raphaël C. -W., Ong, Huey-Fang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tan, Pei-Sze
Rajanala, Sailaja
Pal, Arghya
Phan, Raphaël C. -W.
Ong, Huey-Fang
author_facet Tan, Pei-Sze
Rajanala, Sailaja
Pal, Arghya
Phan, Raphaël C. -W.
Ong, Huey-Fang
contents Detecting concealed emotions within apparently normal expressions is crucial for identifying potential mental health issues and facilitating timely support and intervention. The task of spotting macro and micro-expressions involves predicting the emotional timeline within a video, accomplished by identifying the onset, apex, and offset frames of the displayed emotions. Utilizing foundational facial muscle movement cues, known as facial action units, boosts the accuracy. However, an overlooked challenge from previous research lies in the inadvertent integration of biases into the training model. These biases arising from datasets can spuriously link certain action unit movements to particular emotion classes. We tackle this issue by novel replacement of action unit adjacency information with the action unit causal graphs. This approach aims to identify and eliminate undesired spurious connections, retaining only unbiased information for classification. Our model, named Causal-Ex (Causal-based Expression spotting), employs a rapid causal inference algorithm to construct a causal graph of facial action units. This enables us to select causally relevant facial action units. Our work demonstrates improvement in overall F1-scores compared to state-of-the-art approaches with 0.388 on CAS(ME)^2 and 0.3701 on SAMM-Long Video datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09098
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal-Ex: Causal Graph-based Micro and Macro Expression Spotting
Tan, Pei-Sze
Rajanala, Sailaja
Pal, Arghya
Phan, Raphaël C. -W.
Ong, Huey-Fang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Detecting concealed emotions within apparently normal expressions is crucial for identifying potential mental health issues and facilitating timely support and intervention. The task of spotting macro and micro-expressions involves predicting the emotional timeline within a video, accomplished by identifying the onset, apex, and offset frames of the displayed emotions. Utilizing foundational facial muscle movement cues, known as facial action units, boosts the accuracy. However, an overlooked challenge from previous research lies in the inadvertent integration of biases into the training model. These biases arising from datasets can spuriously link certain action unit movements to particular emotion classes. We tackle this issue by novel replacement of action unit adjacency information with the action unit causal graphs. This approach aims to identify and eliminate undesired spurious connections, retaining only unbiased information for classification. Our model, named Causal-Ex (Causal-based Expression spotting), employs a rapid causal inference algorithm to construct a causal graph of facial action units. This enables us to select causally relevant facial action units. Our work demonstrates improvement in overall F1-scores compared to state-of-the-art approaches with 0.388 on CAS(ME)^2 and 0.3701 on SAMM-Long Video datasets.
title Causal-Ex: Causal Graph-based Micro and Macro Expression Spotting
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09098