  Unlike prevalent facial expressions, micro expressions have subtle,
involuntary muscle movements which are short-lived in nature. These minute
muscle movements reflect true emotions of a person. Due to the short duration
and low intensity, these micro-expressions are very difficult to perceive and
interpret correctly. In this paper, we propose the dynamic representation of
micro-expressions to preserve facial movement information of a video in a
single frame. We also propose a Lateral Accretive Hybrid Network (LEARNet) to
capture micro-level features of an expression in the facial region. The LEARNet
refines the salient expression features in accretive manner by incorporating
accretion layers (AL) in the network. The response of the AL holds the hybrid
feature maps generated by prior laterally connected convolution layers.
Moreover, LEARNet architecture incorporates the cross decoupled relationship
between convolution layers which helps in preserving the tiny but influential
facial muscle change information. The visual responses of the proposed LEARNet
depict the effectiveness of the system by preserving both high- and micro-level
edge features of facial expression. The effectiveness of the proposed LEARNet
is evaluated on four benchmark datasets: CASME-I, CASME-II, CAS(ME)^2 and SMIC.
The experimental results after investigation show a significant improvement of
4.03%, 1.90%, 1.79% and 2.82% as compared with ResNet on CASME-I, CASME-II,
CAS(ME)^2 and SMIC datasets respectively.
