Authors
Yasunari Yoshitomi, Taro Asada, Ryota Kato, Masayoshi Tabuse
Corresponding Author
Yasunari Yoshitomi
Available Online 30 June 2014.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.2991/jrnal.2014.1.1.2How to use a DOI?
Keywords
Facial expression analysis, Video phone, Area of mouth and jaw, Thermal image, and Skype
Abstract
To improve the quality of life of elderly people living in a home or healthcare facility, especially in a rural area, we have been developing a method for analyzing the facial expressions of a person using a video phone system (Skype) to speak with another person. In the present study, we proposed a method for analyzing facial expressions of a person using the video phone system to talk to another person. The recorded video is analyzed by thermal image processing and the newly proposed feature vector of facial expression, which is extracted in the mouth area by applying 2D-DCT. The facial expression intensity, defined as the norm of the difference vector between the feature vector of the neutral facial expression and that of the observed expression, can be used to analyze a change of facial expression. The judgment of utterance is performed by using the intensity of the sound wave. The experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed method. We intend to use the proposed method of facial expression analysis to develop a method for estimating the emotions or mental state of people, especially elderly patients.

Copyright
© 2013, the Authors. Published by ALife Robotics Corp. Ltd.
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).