12,215 research outputs found
EMPATH: A Neural Network that Categorizes Facial Expressions
There are two competing theories of facial expression recognition. Some researchers have suggested that it is an example of "categorical perception." In this view, expression categories are considered to be discrete entities with sharp boundaries, and discrimination of nearby pairs of expressive faces is enhanced near those boundaries. Other researchers, however, suggest that facial expression perception is more graded and that facial expressions are best thought of as points in a continuous, low-dimensional space, where, for instance, "surprise" expressions lie between "happiness" and "fear" expressions due to their perceptual similarity. In this article, we show that a simple yet biologically plausible neural network model, trained to classify facial expressions into six basic emotions, predicts data used to support both of these theories. Without any parameter tuning, the model matches a variety of psychological data on categorization, similarity, reaction times, discrimination, and recognition difficulty, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We thus explain many of the seemingly complex psychological phenomena related to facial expression perception as natural consequences of the tasks' implementations in the brain
Exploring the Affective Loop
Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are
involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al.
2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their
emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously
aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make
other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of
signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we
express.
Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little
focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in
the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can
expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated
/eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With
eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical
experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for
input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and
animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the
user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by
affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed
through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human
Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/
(Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in
real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of
involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of
the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended
interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion
one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address
people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically
experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of
eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally
involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and
ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our
subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design
problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop
effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction,
/harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/
/timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and
effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and
experiences of the interaction
Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder
"If I provide you a face image of mine (without telling you the actual age
when I took the picture) and a large amount of face images that I crawled
(containing labeled faces of different ages but not necessarily paired), can
you show me what I would look like when I am 80 or what I was like when I was
5?" The answer is probably a "No." Most existing face aging works attempt to
learn the transformation between age groups and thus would require the paired
samples as well as the labeled query image. In this paper, we look at the
problem from a generative modeling perspective such that no paired samples is
required. In addition, given an unlabeled image, the generative model can
directly produce the image with desired age attribute. We propose a conditional
adversarial autoencoder (CAAE) that learns a face manifold, traversing on which
smooth age progression and regression can be realized simultaneously. In CAAE,
the face is first mapped to a latent vector through a convolutional encoder,
and then the vector is projected to the face manifold conditional on age
through a deconvolutional generator. The latent vector preserves personalized
face features (i.e., personality) and the age condition controls progression
vs. regression. Two adversarial networks are imposed on the encoder and
generator, respectively, forcing to generate more photo-realistic faces.
Experimental results demonstrate the appealing performance and flexibility of
the proposed framework by comparing with the state-of-the-art and ground truth.Comment: Accepted by The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition (CVPR 2017
Machine Analysis of Facial Expressions
No abstract
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