text: Recognition of Facial Expressions for Improving Communication Skills of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders — Department of Computer Science and Engineering
  Home > Seminars > Recognition of Facial Expressions for Improving Communication Skills of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
  10/5/2012 at 3:30PM
  10/5/2012 at 5:00PM
  Analysis and understanding of facial imagery is an important component of computer vision research today. This is motivated by a number of pressing societal needs of surveillance and recognition of persons. In addition, faces convey the emotional state of a person. Researchers have also addressed the recognition of facial expressions of a person. Recognizing emotional state of a face is a critical trait that is developed by a person at an early age. Also, a significant portion of the communication between persons is achieved through expressions on faces. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are lacking in communication skills through the use of facial expressions at the both levels of displaying as well as recognizing emotions. Professor Aggarwal and his group is designing a game which "influences and encourages" the learning of facial expressions for children with ASDs. The overall system consists of three modules: A. A computer vision subsystem that tracks key features of a player without any markers and recognizes facial expressions B. A computer graphics subsystem which displays a desired facial expression through the use of an avatar C. A game subsystem that controls and directs the player for the game These three subsystems work in real time to "influence and encourage" players to learn the emotional content of faces. The talk will present an outline of our system and show results on each of the subsystems. The impact of the use of the system by children with ASDs will be discussed. Professor Aggarwal will also present other ongoing research projects on faces.
  J. K. Aggarwal has served on the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin College of Engineering and is currently a Cullen Trust Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Computer and Vision Research Center. His research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition and image processing focusing on human motion. A Fellow of IEEE (1976), IAPR (1998) and AAAS (2005), he received the Senior Research Award of the American Society of Engineering Education in 1992, the 1996 Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Computer Society and the Graduate Teaching Award at The University of Texas at Austin in 1992. More recently, he is the recipient of the 2004 K S FU prize of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, the 2005 Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award of the IEEE and the 2007 Okawa Prize of the Okawa Foundation of Japan. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and Golden Core member of IEEE Computer Society. He has authored or edited a number of books, chapters, proceedings of conferences, and papers.