Facial expressions and hand gestures are utilized in nonverbal communication to convey socially relevant information. One key process that mediates nonverbal communication is simulation. The mirror neuron system (MNS), which maps observed actions onto the motor representations used when producing those actions, likely plays a role in simulation. Previous neuroimaging experiments have identified...

Emotional body language constitutes an important channel of nonverbal information. Of this large set, hand-over-face gestures are treated as noise because they occlude facial expressions. In this paper, we propose an alternative facial processing framework where face occlusions instead of being removed, are detected, localized and eventually classified into communicative gestures. We present a ...

One of the main theses of Fridlund's book, that facial displays are not innately derived expressions of emotion, but are social phenomena derived from neuromuscular ontogeny, which are converted into signals is very much at odds with the major theoretical position held by Paul Ekman and Irenaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt that facial gestures are innate aspects of communication. Fridlund supports his posi...

BACKGROUND Recently, the recognition of different facial gestures using facial neuromuscular activities has been proposed for human machine interfacing applications. Facial electromyograms (EMGs) analysis is a complicated field in biomedical signal processing where accuracy and low computational cost are significant concerns. In this paper, a very fast versatile elliptic basis function neural n...

We present two methods for automatic facial gesturing of graphically embodied animated agents. In one case, conversational agent is driven by speech in automatic Lip Sync process. By analyzing speech input, lip movements are determined from the speech signal. Another method provides virtual speaker capable of reading plain English text and rendering it in a form of speech accompanied by the app...

In this paper, we present the humanoid communication robot Fritz. Our robot communicates with people in an intuitive, multimodal way. Fritz uses speech, facial expressions, eye-gaze, and gestures to interact with people. Depending on the audio-visual input, our robot shifts its attention between different persons in order to involve them into the conversation. He performs human-like arm gesture...

Patients with Parkinson's disease suffer from significant motor impairments and accompanying cognitive and affective dysfunction due to progressive disturbances of basal ganglia-cortical gating loops. Parkinson's disease has a long presymptomatic stage, which indicates a substantial capacity of the human brain to compensate for dopaminergic nerve degeneration before clinical manifestation of th...

This paper describes a method for acquiring data for facial movement analysis and implementation in an animated talking head. We will also show preliminary data on how a number of articulatory and facial parameters for some Swedish vowels vary under the influence of expressiveness in speech and gestures. Primarily we have been concerned in expressive gestures and emotions conveying information ...