Facial Communicative Signals

Authors: Christian Lang Sven Wachsmuth Marc Hanheide Heiko Wersing

Publish Date: 2012/03/17

Volume: 4, Issue: 3, Pages: 249-262

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Abstract

This paper investigates facial communicative signals head gestures eye gaze and facial expressions as nonverbal feedback in humanrobot interaction Motivated by a discussion of the literature we suggest scenariospecific investigations due to the complex nature of these signals and present an objectteaching scenario where subjects teach the names of objects to a robot which in turn shall term these objects correctly afterwards The robot’s verbal answers are to elicit facial communicative signals of its interaction partners We investigated the human ability to recognize this spontaneous facial feedback and also the performance of two automatic recognition approaches The first one is a static approach yielding baseline results whereas the second considers the temporal dynamics and achieved classification rates comparable to the human performanceChristian Lang gratefully acknowledges the financial support from Honda Research Institute Europe for the project “Facial Expressions in Communication” The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper

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