Algorithm for automatic detection of atypical patterns in facial affect

eagle-i ID

Resource Type

Properties

1. Resource Description

   Meant to aid and help diagnose people with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). "The expression of affect in face-to-face situations requires the ability to generate a complex, coordinated, cross-modal affective signal, having gesture, facial expression, vocal prosody, and language content modalities. This ability is compromised in neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The PI's long term goal is to build computer-based interactive, agent based systems for remediation of poor affect communication and diagnosis of the underlying neurological disorders based on analysis of affective signals. A requirement for such systems is technology to detect atypical patterns in affective signals. The objective of this project is to develop that technology. Toward that end the PI will develop a play situation for eliciting affect, will collect audio-visual data from approximately 60 children between the ages of 4-7 years old, half of them with ASD and the other half constituting a control group of typically developing children. The PI will label the data on relevant affective dimensions, will develop algorithms for the analysis of affective incongruity, and will then test the algorithms against the labeled data in order to determine their ability to differentiate between ASD and typical development. While automatic methods for cross-modal recognition of discrete affect classes already have yielded promising results, automatic detection and quantification of atypical patterns in affective signals, and the ability to do so in semi-natural interactive situations, is unexplored territory. The PI expects this research will lead to new methods for affect recognition based on facial affective features (with special emphasis on facial frontalization algorithms and on modeling of facial expressive dynamics), vocal affective features, and lexical affective features, as well as to new methods for automated measurement of cross-modal affective incongruity."

2. Used by

   Jan van Santen Laboratory

3. Software purpose

   Disease detection/diagnosis objective

4. Website(s)

   http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0905095