SGER: Analyzing Facial Expression in Three Dimensional Space

Suny At Binghamton, Binghamton NY

Investigators

Abstract

------ The proposed study will conduct a pilot research on facial expression representation, detection, tracking and classification in a complete 3D space. To prove the concept of 3D face expression recognition, the study will investigate the issue on how and what 3D facial features could make the 3D-based expression recognition better than 2D-based recognition. The analysis of 3D facial expressions will facilitate the examination of both the fine structural changes inherent in and the precise time course of spontaneous expressions. Although 3D modeling techniques have been extensively used for 3D face recognition and 3D face animation, barely any research on 3D facial expression recognition has been reported. A primary reason why such research has not yet been undertaken is that no 3D expression database exists. As a proof-of-concept, a state-of-the-art 3D dynamic facial expression database will be constructed to test the algorithms and make it public to the research community to foster the research in the field. The project aims to achieve a high rate of accuracy in identifying a wide range of facial expressions, with the ultimate goal of increasing the general understanding of facial behavior and 3D structure of facial expressions on a detailed level. As a result, this exploratory research will lead to building a humanized system for recognizing spontaneous facial expression, which is crucial to the next generation of human computer interaction, security, human affect recognition, biomedicine, law-enforcement and psychology research. This project will facilitate research on the next generation of human-computer interaction through automatic 3D facial expression recognition. It will help increase the scientific understanding and modeling of cognitive processes of the human visual system. The resulting system and the 3D facial expression database will be valuable for applications in security, law-enforcement, biomedicine, behavior science, entertainment and education. The 3D face expression database will be made available to the entire research community. As an academic institution, SUNY Binghamton has a large and diverse student and staff population. This will facilitate scanning many people of diverse ethnic backgrounds for the database. The results of this research can be integrated into graduate and undergraduate courses at SUNY Binghamton related to image processing, computer vision, and computer graphics.