Expression glasses: a wearable device for facial expression recognition

Expression Glasses provide a wearable "appliance-based" alternative to general-purpose machine vision face recognition systems. The glasses sense facial muscle movements, and use pattern recognition to identify meaningful expressions such as confusion or interest. A prototype of the glasses has been built and evaluated. The prototype uses piezoelectric sensors hidden in a visor extension to a pair of glasses, providing for compactness, user control, and anonymity. On users who received no training or feedback, the glasses initially performed at 94% accuracy in detecting an expression, and at 74% accuracy in recognizing whether the expression was confusion or interest. Significant improvement beyond these numbers appears to be possible with extended use, and with-a small amount of feedback (letting the user see the output of the system).