Capacitive facial activity measurement

Abstract

A wide range of applications can benefit from the measurement of facial activity. The current study presents a method that can be used to detect the movements of different parts of the face and expressions that they form. The method is based on capacitive measurement of facial movements and utilisation of principal component analysis on the measured data to identify active areas of the face. Experiments involving a set of voluntary facial movements were carried out with 10 participants. The results show that the method could be applied to locating facial activity during movements such as raising and lowering eyebrows, opening mouth, raising mouth corners, and lowering mouth corners. Copyright © (2012) by the International Measurement Federation (IMEKO).