A Late Night, Caffine Induced Post on Facial Recognition

Here is just a quick example of how a computer could judge the emotion of someone using facial recognition.

First the program would start with a photo of the head (fig 1.). The way that this would be acquired would vary on the project, but I'd like to see something like a web cam used to update the photo and emotion over time.

Then the face is cropped out of the rest of the image (fig 2.) Again, this dependson the situation that the program was made for.

Several points are found on the face based on physical features (fig 3.) The ones I used on this example are the two ends of the lips, cheek bones, each end of each eyebrow, the nostrils, and the eyes.

The location of the points relative to each other is calculated and this data is used to determine the emotion. In this example, the angle formed by Nostril 1, Nostril2, and Lip 2 are used. As shown in figures 4-6, the more 'sad' the face is, the smaller this angle will be.

For more emotions, the rules would have to be more complex than in this simple example.