Comparative analysis of super resolution reconstructed images for micro expression recognition

It is an established fact that the genuineness of facial micro expression is an effective means for estimating concealed emotions ( Li et al., 2019). Conventionally, analysis of these expressions has been performed using high resolution images which are ideal cases. However, in a real-world scenario, capturing expressions with high resolution images may not always be possible particularly using low-cost surveillance cameras. Faces captured using such cameras are often very tiny and of poor resolution. Due to the loss of discriminative features these images may not be of much use particularly for identifying certain minute facial details. To make these images useful, enhancing the textural information becomes essential and super resolution algorithms can be ideal to achieve this. In this work, we utilize algorithms based on deep learning and generative adversarial network for transforming low resolution micro expression images into super resolution images and examine their fitness particularly for micro expression recognition. The proposed approach is tested on simulated dataset obtained from two popular spontaneous micro expression datasets namely CASME II and SMIC-VIS; the experimental results demonstrate that the method achieved favourable results with the best recognition performance recorded as 61.63%. The significance of this work is: firstly, it thoroughly investigates reconstruction performance of several deep learning super resolution algorithms on simulated low quality micro expression images; secondly, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the results obtained employing these reconstructed images to determine their contribution in addressing image quality issues specifically for micro expression recognition.