Facial expression recognition for multiplayer online games

The Multiplayer Online Game (MOG) becomes more popular than any other types of computer games for its collaboration, communication and interaction ability. However, compared with the ordinary human communication, the MOG still has many limitations, especially in communication using facial expressions. Although detailed facial animation has already been achieved in a number of MOGs, players have to use text commands to control avatars expressions. In this paper, we briefly review the state of the art in facial expression recognition and propose an automatic expression recognition system that can be integrated into a MOG to control the avatar’s facial expressions. We evaluate and improve a number of algorithms to meet the specific requirements of such a system and propose an efficient implementation. In particular, our proposed system uses fixed and less facial landmarks to reduce the computational load with little degradation of the recognition performance.