AU-Guided Synthetic Video Generation for Micro-Expression Recognition
Abstract
Micro-expression recognition is limited by the small scale, narrow demographic coverage, and restricted emotion labels of existing datasets. We introduce EquiME, a synthetic micro-expression dataset built from AU-guided image-to-video generation. EquiME contains 75K videos generated from 15K source face images across five target emotions, together with automatically inferred demographic metadata and video-quality measurements. We evaluate EquiME using frame-pair similarity, spatial variation, and no-reference perceptual-quality metrics, together with cross-dataset MER experiments on SAMM and CASME II. Models trained on EquiME achieve competitive cross-dataset performance on SAMM and CASME II and show comparatively low variation across the four evaluated architectures. This paper focuses on the dataset design, the structured AU-conditioning pipeline used for video generation, and the empirical evidence needed to assess EquiME as a synthetic MER resource. Project page: https://kirito-blade.github.io/me-vlm/
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.10860,
title = {AU-Guided Synthetic Video Generation for Micro-Expression Recognition},
author = {Pei-Sze Tan and Sailaja Rajanala and Yee-Fan Tan and Raphael C. -W. Phan and Huey-Fang Ong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.10860},
year = {2026}
}