via Penn State
An individual may bring their hands to their face when feeling sad or jump into the air when feeling happy. Human body movements convey emotions, which plays a crucial role in everyday communication, according to a team led by Penn State researchers. Combining computing, psychology and performing arts, the researchers developed an annotated human movement dataset that may improve the ability of artificial intelligence to recognize the emotions expressed through body language.
The work — led by James Wang, distinguished professor in the College of Information Systems and Technology (IST) and carried out primarily by Chenyan Wu, a graduating doctoral student in Wang’s group — was published today (Oct. 13) in the print edition of Patterns and featured on the journal’s cover.
“People often move using specific motor patterns to convey emotions and those body movements carry important information about a person’s emotions or mental state,” Wang said. “By describing specific movements common to humans using their foundational patterns, known as motor elements, we can establish the relationship between these motor elements and bodily expressed emotion.”
“People often move using specific motor patterns to convey emotions, and those body movements carry important information about a person’s emotions or mental state.”
James Wang, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology
According to Wang, augmenting machines’ understanding of bodily expressed emotion may help enhance communication between assistive robots and children or elderly users; provide psychiatric professionals with quantitative diagnostic and prognostic assistance; and bolster safety by preventing mishaps in human-machine interactions.
“In this work, we introduced a novel paradigm for bodily expressed emotion understanding that incorporates motor element analysis,” Wang said. “Our approach leverages deep neural networks — a type of artificial intelligence — to recognize motor elements, which are subsequently used as intermediate features for emotion recognition.”
The team created a dataset of the way body movements indicate emotion — body motor elements — using 1,600 human video clips. Each video clip was annotated using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), a method and language for describing, visualizing, interpreting and documenting human movement.
Wu then designed a dual-branch, dual-task movement analysis network capable of using the labeled dataset to produce predictions for both bodily expressed emotion and LMA labels for new images or videos.
“Emotion and LMA element labels are related, and the LMA labels are easier for deep neural networks to learn,” Wu said.
According to Wang, LMA can study motor elements and emotions while simultaneously creating a “high-precision” dataset that demonstrates the effective learning of human movement and emotional expression.
“Incorporating LMA features has effectively enhanced body-expressed emotion understanding,” Wang said. “Extensive experiments using real-world video data revealed that our approach significantly outperformed baselines that considered only rudimentary body movement, showing promise for further advancements in the future.”
Original Article: Human body movements may enable automated emotion recognition, researchers say
More from: Pennsylvania State University | University of Haifa | University of Illinois at Chicago
The Latest Updates from Bing News
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Automated emotion recognition
- Navy men’s lacrosse will pay tribute to 17 seniors during Friday night’s game against Bucknell
Navy men’s lacrosse will honor its 19 seniors with a halftime tribute during Friday night’s final regular season home game against Bucknell. While senior night will provide a public recognition at ...
- The Emotional Ending of 'Baby Reindeer,' Explained
Despite episode 6 ending on what may be Donny's lowest point, the final episode of Baby Reindeer sees the aspiring comedian on an upswing in his career. It turns out that an audience member filmed the ...
- Smile, You’re on an In-Car Camera!
They were initially developed in large part to help drivers keep their eyes on the road and have since evolved to support hands-free automated driving ... of occupants to accessing their health and ...
- How facial recognition technology is reassuring worshippers in places of worship
In a world where worship places serve as the beating heart of communities, their significance cannot be overstated. Regardless of the religion, sacred spaces are the basics of spiritual worship ...
- TUC publishes legislative proposal to protect workers from AI
A bill proposed by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to regulate artificial intelligence in the UK seeks to translate well-meaning principles and values into concrete rights and obligations that protect ...
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Emotion sensing machines
- Medtronic snags FDA approval for body-sensing, closed-loop spinal cord stimulator
Medtronic has secured FDA approval for its first closed-loop spinal cord stimulator, designed to take in signals from the body and adjust its therapy automatically. | The Inceptiv implant for chronic ...
- Smile, You’re on an In-Car Camera!
Brackenbury said Gentex is using AI machine vision to learn more about the health and emotions of vehicle occupants ... to definitely see that start coming into cars as there are more sensing ...
- This AI gadget let me speak in languages I don’t know or understand
The Timekettle X1 is a gadget dedicated solely to helping you speak and translate different languages. But is it any good? Here's what happened when I used it.The Latest Tech News, Delivered to Your I ...
- Smart Eye Publishes its Annual Report 2023
GÖTEBORG, SWEDEN / ACCESSWIRE / April 18, 2024 / (STO:SEYE)(OTC PINK:SMTEF)(FRA:SE9) The Annual Report is attached in this press release but is also available through the company's website: ...
- Sensing a need: Sentara Williamsburg hospital certified as ‘sensory-inclusive’
At a hospital, triggers such as bright ceiling lights and beeping medical machines can be overwhelming for some people. Sentara Williamsburg Regional Medical Center is trying to ease that.