Recognising emotions in human and synthetic faces

Abstract

Embodied Conversational Agents that can express emotions are a popular topic. Yet, despite recent attempts, reliable methods are still lacking to assess the quality of facial displays. This paper extends and refines the work in [6], focusing on the role of the upper and the lower portions of the face. We analysed the recognition rates and errors from the responses of 74 subjects to the presentations of dynamic (human and synthetic) faces. The results points to the possibility of: a) addressing the issue of the naturalness of synthetic faces, and b) a greater importance of the upper part.