EAGER: Exploring the Relation between BMI and Visual Appearance of Face and Body

West Virginia University Research Corporation, Morgantown WV

Investigators

Abstract

Body mass index (BMI) is a measure of the ratio between an individual's weight and height, which is an important parameter to characterize human bodies into four categories, i.e., underweight, normal, overweight, and obese. A high BMI value is associated with a higher risk for conditions such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. This project explores the inherent and fundamental relation between BMI and the visual appearance of human face and body. A major reason of the prevalence of obesity is that many people are not aware of their BMI and the higher risks of various diseases associated with high BMI values. The study of this project leads to develop-ment of an intelligent and computational system that can be used by everybody at anywhere and anytime. The developed system enables people to aware their BMI and understand the strongly correlated high risks of various diseases to combat overweight and obesity. The developed technology can also improve personal health care and quality of life, and public health surveillance. This research explores and determines the relation between BMI and the visual appearance of face and body, in order to obtain knowledge for future developing of a low-cost, portable, reliable, and convenient BMI assessment system. The key research question is what kinds of features or patterns can be extracted from human face and body images to characterize the visual appearance related to BMI measure. In facial images, the study focuses on 2D facial feature representation and its robustness in order to build the mapping relation from face to BMI. In body images, the focuses are on 3D body shape analysis to connect to BMI measure. This research provides a theoretic foundation for developing a visual analysis system that can be deployed to provide convenient estimate of the BMI and related health conditions anywhere and anytime.