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Facial expression recognition in ageing adults: from lab to ambient assisted living

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Abstract

This paper introduces an application that uses a webcam and aims to recognise emotions of ageing adults from their facial expression. Six basic emotions (Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Surprise) as well as a Neutral state are distinguished. Active shape models are applied for feature extraction, the Cohn–Kanade, JAFFE and MMI databases are used for training, and support vector machines (\(\nu\)-SVM) are employed for facial expression classification. These six basic emotions are classified into three categories (Happiness, Negative-Emotion and Surprise), as Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust have been grouped into a single expression. The new three categories are found to be relevant for the purpose of detecting abnormalities in the ageing adult’s mood state. In the future, we will transfer the experience in a lab/research setup to a real ambient assisted living environment, which is the elderly person’s home. The application is devised to be the starting point to enhance the mood of the elderly people living alone at their homes by external stimuli.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad/European Regional Development Fund under TIN2015-72931-EXP and DPI2016-80894-R grants.

Author contributions

All authors have made substantial contributions in the definition of the research line, as well as in experimentation, data analysis, and manuscript preparation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Investigación en Informática de Albacete, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 02071, Albacete, Spain

    Elena Lozano-Monasor

  2. Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Informática, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 02071, Albacete, Spain

    María T. López & Francisco Vigo-Bustos

  3. Escuela de Ingenieros Industriales, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 02071, Albacete, Spain

    Antonio Fernández-Caballero

Authors
  1. Elena Lozano-Monasor
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  2. María T. López
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  3. Francisco Vigo-Bustos
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  4. Antonio Fernández-Caballero
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antonio Fernández-Caballero.

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Lozano-Monasor, E., López, M.T., Vigo-Bustos, F. et al. Facial expression recognition in ageing adults: from lab to ambient assisted living. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 8, 567–578 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-017-0464-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-017-0464-x

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