Facial gesture interfaces for expression and communication

TL;DR

This paper reviews vision-based facial gesture interfaces that enable intentional human-computer interaction across various applications, highlighting their potential for expression, communication, and assistive technology.

Contribution

It provides an overview of facial gesture interface projects focusing on deliberate actions, an area less explored compared to affect recognition.

Findings

Facial gesture interfaces can facilitate communication for motor-impaired users.

Applications include text entry, artistic expression, and assistive technology.

The field is less developed than affect recognition but shows promising potential.

Abstract

Considerable effort has been devoted to the automatic extraction of information about action of the face from image sequences. Within the context of human-computer interaction (HCI) we may distinguish systems that allow expression from those which aim at recognition. Most of the work in facial action processing has been directed at automatically recognizing affect from facial actions. By contrast, facial gesture interfaces, which respond to deliberate facial actions, have received comparatively little attention. This paper reviews several projects on vision-based interfaces that rely on facial action for intentional HCI. Applications to several domains are introduced, including text entry, artistic and musical expression and assistive technology for motor-impaired users.