Development of a non-contact method for the examination of emotional stability

Abstract

Recently, the issue of extracting information about the emotions of people, including people who are under stress, with the help of video analytics, has become relevant. It is known that the change in GSR can reliably judge the presence of depression or a stress state [1], in which a person can pose a threat to himself or society. Since with an increase in skin conductivity as a result of stress, the sympathetic nervous system is involved, one of the signs indicating changes in the emotional state is mydriasis. The purpose of our work: the development of a non-contact method for the examination of emotional stability. To study the emotional stability of a person under the influence of external stress factors, a pupillographic module for registering changes in pupil size without infrared illumination was used; hardware-software complex “Ats-6”. During the experiment, the stimulus material was shown from the monitor screen. The stimulus material contained graphic information - images of the main stress factor of office workers - tedious routine paper work. Images that evoke pity were used as an additional stress factor. The experiments involved 60 volunteers (including the control group). Of these, 28 are female (46.7%), 32 are male (53.3%). The GSR and pupillograms of two groups of people were compared - students during the session and active office employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. An algorithm for processing and analyzing the received video files is presented. The SNR(dB) value for different types of eyes before and after processing the received video files changed as follows: for light eyes, the value increased from 5.4 dB to 13.9 dB; for brown eyes - from 3.4 dB to 9.4 dB; for "transparent" eyes - from 1.9 dB to 2.5 dB. Despite the small SNR, ImageJ allows for high-precision pupil contouring. Clustering of the pupillary response data of the participants made it possible to determine the most probable values ​​of µ, µ2 centroids. Checking the equality of the means µ, µ2 by the Friedman ANOVA method showed that at the level of 0.05 these two distributions differ significantly. Through correlation analysis, it was found that there is a strong relationship between GSR and the duration of pupil size increase in the control group (p=0.87). At the same time, for the group of students in which the pupillary reaction is stronger, the relationship with GSR is less (p=0.72). This can be explained by the prolonged stressful state of the participants in the control group (office workers). The results suggest that the participants in the control group have cognitive processes that allow them to control their emotional state. The results obtained can be useful for non-contact detection of a person's stress state through video analytics.