Computer Vision – ECCV 2012

Abstract

Smiling is an indispensable element of nonverbal social interaction. Besides, automatic distinction between spontaneous and posed expressions is im- portant for visual analysis of social signals. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method to distinguish between spontaneous and posed enjoyment smiles by us- ing the dynamics of eyelid, cheek, and lip corner movements. The discriminative power of these movements, and the effect of different fusion levels are inves- tigated on multiple databases. Our results improve the state-of-the-art. We also introduce the largest spontaneous/posed enjoyment smile database collected to date, and report new empirical and conceptual findings on smile dynamics. The collected database consists of 1240 samples of 400 subjects. Moreover, it has the unique property of having an age range from 8 to 76 years. Large scale experi- ments on the new database indicate that eyelid dynamics are highly relevant for smile classification, and there are age-related differences in smile dynamics.