Multimodal Coordination of Facial Action, Head Rotation, and Eye Motion during Spontaneous Smiles

Both the configuration of facial features and the timing of facial actions are important to emotion and communication. Previous literature has focused on the former. We developed an automatic facial expression analysis system that quantifies the timing of facial actions as well as head and eye motion during spontaneous facial expression. To assess coherence among these modalities, we recorded and analyzed spontaneous smiles in 62 young women of varied ethnicity ranging in age from 18 to 35 years. Spontaneous smiles occurred following directed facial action tasks, a situation likely to elicit spontaneous smiles of embarrassment. Smiles (AU 12) were manually FACS coded by certified FACS coders. 3D head motion was recovered using a cylindrical head model; motion vectors for lip-corner displacement were measured using feature-point tracking; eye closure and horizontal and vertical eye motion (from which to infer direction of gaze or visual regard) were measured by a generative model fitti...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: FGR
• Authors: Jeffrey F. Cohn, Lawrence Ian Reed, Tsuyoshi Moriyama, Jing Xiao, Karen L. Schmidt, Zara Ambadar
• Keywords: Biometrics, Facial Actions, Facial Expression, FGR 2004, Spontaneous Smiles