A Novel Combined Optical Flow Approach for Comprehensive Micro-Expression Recognition

Facial micro-expressions are brief, involuntary facial movements that reveal hidden emotions. Most Micro-Expression Recognition (MER) methods that rely on optical flow typically focus on the onset-to-apex phase, neglecting the apex-to-offset phase, which holds key temporal dynamics. This study introduces a Combined Optical Flow (COF), integrating both phases to enhance feature representation. COF provides a more comprehensive motion analysis, improving MER performance. Experimental results on CASMEII and SAMM datasets show that COF outperforms single optical flow-based methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing micro-expression dynamics.