Emotion analysis from faces for social robotics

Abstract

A social robot is able to perceive the information about the environment (both in terms of persons and objects populating the scene), to reason about the acquired information and to interact with the human in a proper way. Among the information required for the interaction with a human, the capability of analysing the emotion is surely among the most important ones. Another relevant feature of social robots is the possibility to interact with the human in real time, without any latency that could introduce a delay in the talk between the human and the robot. It means that all the processing of the information (for instance the analysis of the sequence of images for the detection of the persons and the consequent emotion analysis) needs to be performed directly on board of the robot, without any possibility to use high performance servers (for instance services on the cloud) but only small devices that can be installed directly on board of the robotic platform. In this paper we propose MIVIAbot, a robotic platform based on the Pepper humanoid robot and equipped with a small, low cost and low energy consumption embedded device installed directly on board of Pepper, without any requirements for a Wi-Fi connection that could introduce any latency for the transmission of the data. Furthermore, we also propose a method for the analysis of the emotion of the persons by face analysis, able to run on the considered hardware platform in real time without paying in terms of accuracy. The experimentation conducted over various widely adopted datasets of images and videos for emotion analysis confirms both the efficiency and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.