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Advances in Facial Micro-Expression Detection and Recognition: A Comprehensive Review


Citation

Shuai, Tian and Beng, Seng and Khalid, Fatimah Binti and Rahmat, Rahmita Wirza Bt O.K. (2025) Advances in Facial Micro-Expression Detection and Recognition: A Comprehensive Review. Information (Switzerland), 16 (10). art. no. 876. pp. 1-24. ISSN 2078-2489

Abstract

Micro-expressions are facial movements with extremely short duration and small amplitude, which can reveal an individual’s potential true emotions and have important application value in public safety, medical diagnosis, psychotherapy and business negotiations. Since micro-expressions change rapidly and are difficult to detect, manual recognition is a significant challenge, so the development of automatic recognition systems has become a research hotspot. This paper reviews the development history and research status of micro-expression recognition and systematically analyzes the two main branches of micro-expression analysis: micro-expression detection and micro-expression recognition. In terms of detection, the methods are divided into three categories based on time features, feature changes and deep features according to different feature extraction methods; in terms of recognition, traditional methods based on texture and optical flow features, as well as deep learning-based methods that have emerged in recent years, including motion unit, keyframe and transfer learning strategies, are summarized. This paper also summarizes commonly used micro-expression datasets and facial image preprocessing techniques and evaluates and compares mainstream methods through multiple experimental indicators. Although significant progress has been made in this field in recent years, it still faces challenges such as data scarcity, class imbalance and unstable recognition accuracy. Future research can further combine multimodal emotional information, enhance data generalization capabilities, and optimize deep network structures to promote the widespread application of micro-expression recognition in practical scenarios.


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Additional Metadata

Item Type: Article
Subject: Information Systems
Divisions: Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology
DOI Number: https://doi.org/10.3390/info16100876
Publisher: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)
Keywords: Automatic recognition; Deep learning; Feature extraction; Micro-expressions; Multimodal emotion analysis
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being, SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Depositing User: Ms. Siti Radziah Mohamed@mahmod
Date Deposited: 20 May 2026 07:06
Last Modified: 20 May 2026 07:06
Altmetrics: http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?domain=psasir.upm.edu.my&doi=10.3390/info16100876
URI: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/125704
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