Assisting, not training, autistic children to recognize and share each other’s emotions via automatic face-tracking in a collaborative play environment

Abstract

One of the core characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is the presence of early and persistent impairments in social-communicative skills; and among the diagnostic characterization, difficulty in recognizing faces and interpreting facial emotions have been reported at all stages of development in ASD. Till now, an overwhelming number of previous works focus on training children with ASD on emotion recognition mostly via face perception and learning. Few published works have attempted on designing assistive tools to help the population recognize the emotions expressed by each other and make the emotion labels aware among each other, which motivates our present study. Drawn from results from our previous works, in this paper, we offer a collaborative play environment to inform autistic children each other’s emotions with an aim to engage them happily and with much less stress. The emotion recognition is accomplished through a mounted motion capture camera which can capture users’ facial landmark data and generate emotion labels accordingly.