Emotions the quick way
Thursday 6 November 2008
Athanasios Pavlou and Dr Matthew Casey have a paper on recognising emotions from facial expressions accepted for presentation at the INNS New Directions in Neural Networks Symposia 2008 in Auckland, New Zealand. The technique described uses a model of sub-cortical visual processing in humans, which has been shown to allow us to recognise facial expressions quickly prior to conscious thought.
Pavlou, A. & Casey, M.C., Identifying Emotions Using Topographic Conditioning Maps. Proceedings of the INNS New Directions in Neural Networks Symposia (INNS-NNN) 2008, Auckland, New Zealand.
"The amygdala is the neural structure that acts as an evaluator of potentially threatening stimuli. We present a biologically plausible model of the visual fear conditioning pathways leading to the amygdala, using a topographic conditioning map (TCM). To evaluate the model, we first use abstract stimuli to understand its ability to form topographic representations, and subsequently to condition on arbitrary stimuli. We then present results on facial emotion recognition using the sub-cortical pathway of the model. Compared to other emotion classification approaches, our model performs well, but does not have the need to pre-specify features. This generic ability to organise visual stimuli is enhanced through conditioning, which also improves classification performance. Our approach demonstrates that a biologically motivated model can be applied to real-world tasks, while allowing us to explore biological hypotheses."