Automation of Non-verbal Communication of Facial Expressions

Human Expression Recognition Clips Utilised Expert System [0] was designed to recognise facial expressions of the observed person in an automatic way. HERCULES forms a part of an Automated System for Non-verbal Communication [1] and represent the implementation of the facial expression analysis that the system performs. The theoretical formulation of facial expression recognition, whereupon inference engine of HERCULES is built, has been acquired from FACS [2]. HERCULES contains also a second inference engine emotion recognition engine that offers an emotional interpretation to the recognised facial expression. Currently HERCULES’ emotion recognition is based on the recognition of so-called six basic emotions defined by Ekman [3a][3b]: happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and anger. Making the system independent of any of the propagated psychological theories about emotions will be the next step in the development of HERCULES. The system now accepts manually made measurements on a full-face photograph and returns a description of the shown facial expression, quantitative measurement of it, its interpretation in terms of the six basic emotions and quantitative measurement of that emotional interpretation. Although the current version of HERCULES operates with a manual input, a fully automated version of the system is in its latest phase [4].