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

A Review of Dynamic Datasets for Facial Expression Research

Temporal dynamics have been increasingly recognized as an important component of facial expressions. With the need for appropriate stimuli in research and application, a range of databases of dynamic facial stimuli has been developed. The present article reviews the existing corpora and describes the key dimensions and properties of the available sets. This includes a discussion of conceptual features in terms of thematic issues in dataset construction as well as practical features which are of applied interest to stimulus usage. To identify the most influential sets, we further examine their citation rates and usage frequencies in existing studies. General limitations and implications for emotion research are noted and future directions for stimulus generation are outlined

A survey on mouth modeling and analysis for Sign Language recognition

© 2015 IEEE.Around 70 million Deaf worldwide use Sign Languages (SLs) as their native languages. At the same time, they have limited reading/writing skills in the spoken language. This puts them at a severe disadvantage in many contexts, including education, work, usage of computers and the Internet. Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) can support the Deaf in many ways, e.g. by enabling the development of systems for Human-Computer Interaction in SL and translation between sign and spoken language. Research in ASLR usually revolves around automatic understanding of manual signs. Recently, ASLR research community has started to appreciate the importance of non-manuals, since they are related to the lexical meaning of a sign, the syntax and the prosody. Nonmanuals include body and head pose, movement of the eyebrows and the eyes, as well as blinks and squints. Arguably, the mouth is one of the most involved parts of the face in non-manuals. Mouth actions related to ASLR can be either mouthings, i.e. visual syllables with the mouth while signing, or non-verbal mouth gestures. Both are very important in ASLR. In this paper, we present the first survey on mouth non-manuals in ASLR. We start by showing why mouth motion is important in SL and the relevant techniques that exist within ASLR. Since limited research has been conducted regarding automatic analysis of mouth motion in the context of ALSR, we proceed by surveying relevant techniques from the areas of automatic mouth expression and visual speech recognition which can be applied to the task. Finally, we conclude by presenting the challenges and potentials of automatic analysis of mouth motion in the context of ASLR

Is 2D Unlabeled Data Adequate for Recognizing Facial Expressions?

Automatic facial expression recognition is one of the important challenges for computer vision and machine learning. Despite the fact that many successes have been achieved in the recent years, several important but unresolved problems still remain. This paper describes a facial expression recognition system based on the random forest technique. Contrary to the many previous methods, the proposed system uses only very simple landmark features, with the view of a possible real-time implementation on low-cost portable devices. Both supervised and unsupervised variants of the method are presented. However, the main objective of the paper is to provide some quantitative experimental evidence behind more fundamental questions in facial articulation analysis, namely the relative significance of 3D information as oppose to 2D data only and importance of the labelled training data in the supervised learning as opposed to the unsupervised learning. The comprehensive experiments are performed on the BU-3DFE facial expression database. These experiments not only show the effectiveness of the described methods but also demonstrate that the common assumptions about facial expression recognition are debatable

Is the 2D unlabelled data adequate for facial expressionrecognition?

Automatic facial expression recognition is one of the important challenges for computer vision and machine learning. Despite the fact that many successes have been achieved in the recent years, several important but unresolved problems still remain. This paper describes a facial expression recognition system based on the random forest technique. Contrary to the many previous methods, the proposed system uses only very simple landmark features, with the view of a possible real-time implementation on low-cost portable devices. Both supervised and unsupervised variants of the method are presented. However, the main objective of the paper is toprovide some quantitative experimental evidence behind more fundamental questions in facial articulation analysis, namely the relative significance of 3D information as oppose to 2D data only and importance of the labelled training data in the supervised learning as opposed to the unsupervised learning. The comprehensive experiments are performed on the BU-3DFE facial expression database. These experiments not only show theeffectiveness of the described methods but also demonstrate that the common assumptions about facial expression recognition are debatable

Multimodal Based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition for Hard-of-Hearing: State of the Art Techniques and Challenges

Multimodal Integration (MI) is the study of merging the knowledge acquired by the nervous system using sensory modalities such as speech, vision, touch, and gesture. The applications of MI expand over the areas of Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR), Sign Language Recognition (SLR), Emotion Recognition (ER), Bio Metrics Applications (BMA), Affect Recognition (AR), Multimedia Retrieval (MR), etc. The fusion of modalities such as hand gestures- facial, lip- hand position, etc., are mainly used sensory modalities for the development of hearing-impaired multimodal systems. This paper encapsulates an overview of multimodal systems available within literature towards hearing impaired studies. This paper also discusses some of the studies related to hearing-impaired acoustic analysis. It is observed that very less algorithms have been developed for hearing impaired AVSR as compared to normal hearing. Thus, the study of audio-visual based speech recognition systems for the hearing impaired is highly demanded for the people who are trying to communicate with natively speaking languages.  This paper also highlights the state-of-the-art techniques in AVSR and the challenges faced by the researchers for the development of AVSR systems