Lagrangian Motion Magnification with Double Sparse Optical Flow Decomposition

Motion magnification techniques aim at amplifying and hence revealing subtle motion in videos. There are basically two main approaches to reach this goal, namely via Eulerian or Lagrangian techniques. While the first one magnifies motion implicitly by operating directly on image pixels, the Lagrangian approach uses optical flow techniques to extract and amplify pixel trajectories. Microexpressions are fast and spatially small facial expressions that are difficult to detect. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for local Lagrangian motion magnification of facial micromovements. Our contribution is three-fold: first, we fine-tune the recurrent all-pairs field transforms for optical flows (RAFT) deep learning approach for faces by adding ground truth obtained from the variational dense inverse search (DIS) for optical flow algorithm applied to the CASME II video set of faces. This enables us to produce optical flows of facial videos in an efficient and sufficiently accurate way. Second, since facial micromovements are both local in space and time, we propose to approximate the optical flow field by sparse components both in space and time leading to a double sparse decomposition. Third, we use this decomposition to magnify micro-motions in specific areas of the face, where we introduce a new forward warping strategy using a triangular splitting of the image grid and barycentric interpolation of the RGB vectors at the corners of the transformed triangles. We demonstrate the very good performance of our approach by various examples.