New face mask requirements to slow the spread of COVID-19 have complex ramifications on stigma for people who facial paralysis or difference. The author, a psychology researcher has paralysis, links her research and insight into adapting destigmatizing pandemic. Masks render this visible disability nearly invisible, potentially undermining adaptation identity. While without are suddenly experie...

Study of emotions in human-computer interaction is a growing research area. Focusing on automatic emotion recognition, work is being performed in order to achieve good results particularly in speech and facial gesture recognition. This paper presents a study where, using a wide range of speech parameters, improvement in emotion recognition rates is analyzed. Using an emotional multimodal biling...

FlurMax, a virtual agent, inhabits a hallway at the University of Bielefeld. He resides in a wide-screen panel equipped with a video camera to track and interact with visitors using speech, gesture, and emotional facial expression. For example, FlurMax will detect the presence of visitors and greet them with a friendly wave, saying "Hello, I am Max". FlurMax also recognizes simple gesturing of ...

In the Collaborative Research Center SFB 360 “Situated Artificial Communicators” the anthropomorphic agent Max is under development. Max inhabits a CAVE-like Virtual Reality environment where he is visualized in human size. Engaged in cooperative construction tasks, the human user meets a multimodal communication partner that employs synthetic speech, gaze, facial expression, and gesture. Combi...

Development of new technologies contributes significantly to changes in interaction and interface design of everyday devices and more specialized medical devices. The following article is an attempt to analyze which of these solutions may have a direct effect to change the level of safety in use, forms of interaction, appearance and usefulness of medical ultrasound equipment. Particular attenti...

Skin color detection is the process that classifies unknown colors into skin or non-skin classes. Skin color detection is preliminary step for facial or gesture analysis and can reduce search space for next higher level processing. In this paper, we show that proposed PCAbased color representation can give better performance than other frequently used color spaces such as XYZ and Luv. For skin ...

An endoscope is an invaluable tool to interpret conditions within a body. Flexible endoscopes are controlled by a set of rotational knobs requiring a doctor's hands to guide and locate the view. This research uses a combination of a camera, facial recognition techniques and software to create a hands-free gesture recognition application for use by a physician to probe the internals of a human b...

This paper explores the use of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for the recognition of head gestures. A gesture corresponds to a particular pattern of head movement. The facial plane is tracked using a parameterized model and the temporal sequence of three image rotation parameters are used to describe four gestures. A dynamic vector quantization scheme was implemented to transform the parameters in...

Facial expression and hand gesture analysis plays a fundamental part in emotionally rich man-machine interaction (MMI) systems, since it employs universally accepted non-verbal cues to estimate the users’ emotional state. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to extracting expression related features from image sequences and inferring an emotional state via an intelligent rule-based s...

This study relates to a method for determining the position variation (for example a moving object, facial gesture tracking) using markers. The movement is determined based on the periodic frames captured using a camera. The experimental results show that this algorithm can accurately segment human movements from complex background and can greatly reduce the computational workload with less sto...