Weakly Supervised Micro- and Macro-Expression Spotting Based on Multi-Level Consistency

Most micro- and macro-expression spotting methods in untrimmed videos suffer from the burden of video-wise collection and frame-wise annotation. Weakly supervised expression spotting (WES) based on video-level labels can potentially mitigate the complexity of frame-level annotation while achieving fine-grained frame-level spotting. However, we argue that existing weakly supervised methods are based on multiple instance learning (MIL) involving inter-modality, inter-sample, and inter-task gaps. The inter-sample gap is primarily from the sample distribution and duration. Therefore, we propose a novel and simple WES framework, MC-WES, using multi-consistency collaborative mechanisms that include modal-level saliency, video-level distribution, label-level duration and segment-level feature consistency strategies to implement fine frame-level spotting with only video-level labels to alleviate the above gaps and merge prior knowledge. The modal-level saliency consistency strategy focuses on capturing key correlations between raw images and optical flow. The video-level distribution consistency strategy utilizes the difference of sparsity in temporal distribution. The label-level duration consistency strategy exploits the difference in the duration of facial muscles. The segment-level feature consistency strategy emphasizes that features under the same labels maintain similarity. Experimental results on three challenging datasets–CAS(ME)$^{2}$, CAS(ME)$^{3}$, and SAMM-LV–demonstrate that MC-WES is comparable to state-of-the-art fully supervised methods.