Reference Paper (From Maryam's blog post)
HEFES: An Hybrid
Engine for Facial Expressions Synthesis to control human-like androids and
avatars
Daniele
Mazzei, Nicole Lazzeri, David Hanson and Danilo De Rossi
Overview of the Paper
Facial expression analysis is very important in the field of affective computing. Affective computing is the section of computer science which deals with detecting and expressing human emotions and different affective states. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is a guide to study the facial expressions of human. This method is based of anatomical properties of human face. This model is used to synthesize human expression in avatar or robotic faces. FACS works with different action units. Action units refer to a single or combination of muscles. The authors tested their proposed method on both physical humanoid robot and also in 3-D virtual avatar.
Evaluation and Validity of the Paper
Human-like robots are used widely
now-a-days in health sectors. One of the examples of human-like robot usage is
in an alternative therapy for children with autism disorder (ASD). ASD children
are facing difficulties to communicate with human. There are some experiments
in health section is to see who well they communicate with virtual agents or
human-like avatars. There are several algorithms like HEFES which is used to
synthesis human emotions in virtual agents face based on FACS.
In this paper,
the authors designed an experiment with two groups of children to test the
capability of HEFES algorithm in conveying emotion to the robot. One group of
children is normal children, and the other group of children is children with
ASD. Both groups of children are interacting with robots both individually and
under the supervision of a therapist. The result of this study shows that
happiness, anger, and sadness are recognized by both groups of children. This
is because body movements and verbal cues play a great role in conveying these
emotions.
Improvement Scopes
One extension of this paper may
be considering other non-verbal features like eye-gaze and head movements. These
two non-verbal behavior plays very important role in emotion detection, and
emotion synthesis.
Further Reading
One of
the interesting articles, which
are cited by this paper, is “Exploring
the Aesthetic Range for Humanoid Robots”, by David
Hanson [2]. In this
paper, the author performed experiment on human reaction to near realistic
androids.
References
[1] D.Mazzei,
N.Lazzeri, D.Hanson, and D. De Rossi, HEFES: an Hybrid Engine for Facial Expressions
Synthesis to control, in proceeding BIOROB 2012 proceedings, 2012.
[2] D.
Hanson, “Exploring the aesthetic range for humanoid robots,” in Proceedings
of the ICCS CogSci 2006 Symposium Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science.
Citeseer, 2006, p. 1620.
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