ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR DETECTION OF FACIAL MUSCLE TWITCHING
Keywords:
Artificial intelligence; Facial muscle twitching; Computer vision; Neuromuscular screening; Deep learningAbstract
Facial muscle twitching is a subtle physiological signal characterized by short-duration and low-amplitude movements, making it difficult to detect using conventional visual observation. This study aims to systematically review the application of artificial intelligence in facial movement analysis and propose an engineering-based framework for neuromuscular screening systems. PRISMA methodology was employed to screen 320 studies, of which 35 were selected for detailed analysis.
The results indicate that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are the most widely used models (60%), followed by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models (25%) and hybrid CNN-LSTM models (15%). Their average accuracy ranges were 82–86%, 78–84%, and 88–92%, respectively. More than 70% of the reviewed studies still relied on micro-expression datasets such as CASME II, while only a limited number were validated in real-world environments. A six-stage screening framework is proposed to support early detection of neuromuscular abnormalities.
References
Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., & Altman, D. G. (2009). Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: The PRISMA statement. PLOS Medicine, 6(7), e1000097.
Khor, H. Q., See, J., Phan, R. C. W., & Lin, W. (2019). Dual-stream shallow networks for facial micro-expression recognition. Image and Vision Computing, 81, 1–11.
Li, X., Hong, X., Moilanen, A., Huang, X., Pfister, T., Zhao, G., & Pietikäinen, M. (2018). Towards reading hidden emotions: A comparative study of micro-expression spotting and recognition methods. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 9(4), 563–577.
Wang, Y., See, J., Phan, R. C. W., & Oh, Y. H. (2020). Efficient spatio-temporal networks for micro-expression recognition. Pattern Recognition, 107, 107468.
Yan, W.-J., Li, X., Wang, S.-J., Zhao, G., Liu, Y.-J., Chen, Y.-H., & Fu, X. (2014). CASME II: An improved spontaneous micro-expression database and baseline evaluation. PLOS ONE, 9(1), e86041.
Davison, A. K., Lansley, C., Costen, N., Tan, K., & Yap, M. H. (2018). SAMM: A spontaneous micro-facial movement dataset. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 9(1), 116–129.
Pfister, T., Li, X., Zhao, G., & Pietikäinen, M. (2011). Recognising spontaneous facial micro-expressions. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pp. 1449–1456.
Liong, S. T., See, J., Wong, K., & Phan, R. C. W. (2016). Less is more: Micro-expression recognition from video using apex frame. Signal Processing: Image Communication, 62, 82–92.
Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., & Hinton, G. E. (2012). ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 25, 1097–1105.
Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997). Long short-term memory. Neural Computation, 9(8), 1735–1780.
Donahue, J., Hendricks, L. A., Rohrbach, M., Venugopalan, S., Guadarrama, S., Saenko, K., & Darrell, T. (2017). Long-term recurrent convolutional networks for visual recognition and description. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 39(4), 677–691.
Wu, H. Y., Rubinstein, M., Shih, E., Guttag, J., Durand, F., & Freeman, W. T. (2012). Eulerian video magnification for revealing subtle changes in the world. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 31(4), Article 65.
Kitchenham, B., & Charters, S. (2007). Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering. Keele University Technical Report.
Tranfield, D., Denyer, D., & Smart, P. (2003). Towards a methodology for developing evidence-informed management knowledge. British Journal of Management, 14(3), 207–222.
Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., & Courville, A. (2016). Deep Learning. MIT Press.
Bishop, C. M. (2006). Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. Springer.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Journal of science and technology RMUTSB

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.