CDER-SME: A Cross-Device Event-RGB Micro-Expression Dataset under Multi-Level Stress Induction

Abstract

Micro-expression recognition (MER) in realistic scenarios demands high temporal sensitivity and ecological validity, yet existing benchmarks are largely constrained to laboratory-controlled settings and rigid hardware-coupled sensing. We introduce CDER-SME, a cross-device Event-RGB dataset collected under a multi-level stress induction framework (cognitive and social) to elicit spontaneous emotional leakage. To enable reproducible acquisition with independent, decoupled sensors, we provide a hardware-agnostic alignment pipeline for temporal synchronization and landmark-guided spatial registration. CDER-SME adopts a three-tier structure with 92 subjects and 1,963 expert-annotated samples (Action Units and emotions), including 790 Event-RGB pairs and 210 high-fidelity aligned pairs. We further report a reproducible multimodal baseline, where cross-modal fusion improves performance over single-modality counterparts, supporting the complementarity of event dynamics and RGB cues. By removing the need for coaxial calibration, CDER-SME offers a practical benchmark for cross-device alignment and deployable Event-RGB MER in real-world affective intelligence.