Emotion Recognition using Facial Thermal Images

Abstract

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate facial temperature changes induced by facial expression and emotional state in order to recognize a persons emotion using facial thermal images. Background: Facial thermal images have two advantages compared to visual images. Firstly, facial temperature measured by thermal camera does not depend on skin color, darkness, and lighting condition. Secondly, facial thermal images are changed not only by facial expression but also emotional state. To our knowledge, there is no study to concurrently investigate these two sources of facial temperature changes. Method: 231 students participated in the experiment. Four kinds of stimuli inducing anger, fear, boredom, and neutral were presented to participants and the facial temperatures were measured by an infrared camera. Each stimulus consisted of baseline and emotion period. Baseline period lasted during 1min and emotion period 1~3min. In the data analysis, the temperature differences between the baseline and emotion state were analyzed. Eyes, mouth, and glabella were selected for facial expression features, and forehead, nose, cheeks were selected for emotional state features. Results: The temperatures of eyes, mouth, glanella, forehead, and nose area were significantly decreased during the emotional experience and the changes were significantly different by the kind of emotion. The result of linear discriminant analysis for emotion recognition showed that the correct classification percentage in four emotions was 62.7% when using both facial expression features and emotional state features. The accuracy was slightly but significantly decreased at 56.7% when using only facial expression features, and the accuracy was 40.2% when using only emotional state features. Conclusion: Facial expression features are essential in emotion recognition, but emotion state features are also important to classify the emotion. Application: The results of this study can be applied to human-computer interaction system in the work places or the automobiles.BRBRBR