GeoConv: Geodesic guided convolution for facial action unit recognition

•We propose a novel geodesic guided convolution (GeoConv), which can be applied to fine-grained face analysis tasks such as AU recognition.•We propose an AU recognition network based on GeoConv. This is the first work of integrating 3D information into 2D convolution for AU recognition.•Experiments verify the effectiveness of our approach and show that our method soundly outperforms the SOTA methods on BP4D and DISFA benchmarks.