Human Stress Recognition from Facial Thermal-Based Signature: A Literature Survey

Abstract

Stress is a normal reaction of the human organism which triggered in situations that require a certain level of activation. This reaction has both positive and negative effects on everyone’s life. Therefore, stress management is of vital importance in maintaining the psychological balance of a person. Thermal-based imaging technique is becoming popular among researchers due to its non-contact conductive nature. Moreover, thermal-based imaging has shown promising results in detecting stress in a non-contact and non-invasive manner. Compared to other non-contact stress detection methods such as pupil dilation, keystroke behavior, social media interaction and voice modulation, thermal-based imaging provides better features with clear boundaries and requires no heavy methodology. This paper presented a brief review of previous work on thermal imaging related stress detection in humans. This paper also presented the stages of stress detection based on thermal face signatures such as dataset type, thermal image face detection, feature descriptors and classification performance comparisons are presented. This paper can help future researchers to understand stress detection based on thermal imaging by presenting the popular methods previous researchers use for stress detection based on thermal images.