Facial Asymmetry Analysis Based on 3-D Dynamic Scans

Facial dysfunction is a fundamental symptom which often relates to many neurological illnesses, such as stroke, Bell’s palsy, Parkinson’s disease, etc. The current methods for detecting and assessing facial dysfunctions mainly rely on the trained practitioners which have significant limitations as they are often subjective. This paper presents a computer-based methodology of facial asymmetry analysis which aims for automatically detecting facial dysfunctions. The method is based on dynamic 3-D scans of human faces. The preliminary evaluation results testing on facial sequences from Hi4D-ADSIP database suggest that the proposed method is able to assist in the quantification and diagnosis of facial dysfunctions for neurological patients

Empirical mode decomposition-based facial pose estimation inside video sequences

We describe a new pose-estimation algorithm via integration of the strength in both empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and mutual information. While mutual information is exploited to measure the similarity between facial images to estimate poses, EMD is exploited to decompose input facial images into a number of intrinsic mode function (IMF) components, which redistribute the effect of noise, expression changes, and illumination variations as such that, when the input facial image is described by the selected IMF components, all the negative effects can be minimized. Extensive experiments were carried out in comparisons to existing representative techniques, and the results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better pose-estimation performances with robustness to noise corruption, illumination variation, and facial expressions

Classification of Humans into Ayurvedic Prakruti Types using Computer Vision

Ayurveda, a 5000 years old Indian medical science, believes that the universe and hence humans are made up of five elements namely ether, fire, water, earth, and air. The three Doshas (Tridosha) Vata, Pitta, and Kapha originated from the combinations of these elements. Every person has a unique combination of Tridosha elements contributing to a person’s ‘Prakruti’. Prakruti governs the physiological and psychological tendencies in all living beings as well as the way they interact with the environment. This balance influences their physiological features like the texture and colour of skin, hair, eyes, length of fingers, the shape of the palm, body frame, strength of digestion and many more as well as the psychological features like their nature (introverted, extroverted, calm, excitable, intense, laidback), and their reaction to stress and diseases. All these features are coded in the constituents at the time of a person’s creation and do not change throughout their lifetime. Ayurvedic doctors analyze the Prakruti of a person either by assessing the physical features manually and/or by examining the nature of their heartbeat (pulse). Based on this analysis, they diagnose, prevent and cure the disease in patients by prescribing precision medicine. This project focuses on identifying Prakruti of a person by analysing his facial features like hair, eyes, nose, lips and skin colour using facial recognition techniques in computer vision. This is the first of its kind research in this problem area that attempts to bring image processing into the domain of Ayurveda

Facial emotion recognition using min-max similarity classifier

Recognition of human emotions from the imaging templates is useful in a wide variety of human-computer interaction and intelligent systems applications. However, the automatic recognition of facial expressions using image template matching techniques suffer from the natural variability with facial features and recording conditions. In spite of the progress achieved in facial emotion recognition in recent years, the effective and computationally simple feature selection and classification technique for emotion recognition is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient and straightforward facial emotion recognition algorithm to reduce the problem of inter-class pixel mismatch during classification. The proposed method includes the application of pixel normalization to remove intensity offsets followed-up with a Min-Max metric in a nearest neighbor classifier that is capable of suppressing feature outliers. The results indicate an improvement of recognition performance from 92.85% to 98.57% for the proposed Min-Max classification method when tested on JAFFE database. The proposed emotion recognition technique outperforms the existing template matching methods