Neonatal imitation is the matching of (often facial) gestures by newborn infants. Some studies suggest that performance of facial gestures is due to general arousal, which may produce false positives on neonatal imitation assessments. Here we examine whether arousal is linked to facial gesturing in newborn infant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). We tested 163 infants in a neonatal imitation pa...

Facial displays are an extremely important communication channel fulfilling a wide variety of functions in discourse and conversation. Humans use them naturally, often subconsciously, and are therefore very sensitive to the application of such displays in their computer-generated correspondents, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA). In this chapter, we aim to provide an extensive survey of one ...

Gesture is a form of non-verbal, action-based communication made with a part of the body and used instead of and/or in combination with verbal communication. People frequently use gestures for more effective inter-personal communication; out of which nearly 55% come from the facial expressions alone. Facial gestures often reveal when people are trying to conceal emotions such as fear, contempt,...

In our current work we concentrate on finding correlation between speech signal and occurrence of facial gestures. Motivation behind this work is computer-generated human correspondent, ECA. In order to have a believable human representative it is important for an ECA to implement facial gestures in addition to verbal and emotional displays. Information needed for generation of facial gestures ...

Human facial gestures often exhibit such natural stochastic variations as how often the eyes blink, how often the eyebrows and the nose twitch, and how the head moves while speaking. The stochastic movements of facial features are key ingredients for generating convincing facial expressions. Although such small variations have been simulated using noise functions in many graphics applications, ...

The authors present a new method of recognizing different human facial gestures through their neural activities and muscle movements, which can be used in machine-interfacing applications. Human-machine interface (HMI) technology utilizes human neural activities as input controllers for the machine. Recently, much work has been done on the specific application of facial electromyography (EMG)-b...

Human communication relies on a large number of different communication mechanisms like spoken language, facial expressions, or gestures. Facial expressions and gestures are one of the main nonverbal communication mechanisms and pass large amounts of information between human dialog partners. Therefore, to allow for intuitive human-machine interaction, a real-time capable processing and recogni...

People naturally express themselves through facial gestures and expressions. Our goal is to build a facial gesture human-computer interface for use in robot applications. We have implemented an interface that tracks a person’s facial features in real time (30Hz). Our system does not require special illumination nor facial makeup. By using multiple Kalman filters we accurately predict and robust...

People often hold their hands near their faces as a gesture in natural conversation, which can interfere with affective inference from facial expressions. However, these gestures are valuable as an additional channel for multi-modal inference. We analyse hand-over-face gestures in a corpus of naturalistic labelled expressions and propose the use of those gestures as a novel affect cue for autom...