Facial Expression Recognition as A Creative Interface

We present an audiovisual creativity tool that automatically recognizes facial expressions in real time, producing sounds in combination with images. The facial expression recognition component detects and tracks a face and outputs a feature vector of motions of specific locations in the face. The feature vector is used as input to a Bayesian network which classifies facial expressions into several categories (e.g., angry, disgusted, happy, etc.). The classification results are used along with the feature vector to generate a combination of sounds and images that change in real time depending on the person's facial expressions. We explain the basic components of our tool and several possible applications in the arts (performance, installation) and medical domains. Copyright 2008 ACM.