Expression recognition turns humans into remote controls... for robots

Jacob Whitehill at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering has demonstrated a proof of concept that allows his facial expressions to speed-up and slow-down video playback. Pretty sweet. But we're more interested to hear that his project is part of a larger effort at the UCSD Machine Perception Lab (gulp) to use automated face recognition to "make robots more effective teachers." We can see the future now...

Human: (frowning)
Robot: Aw, my meat bag is sad, I will now give it a hamburger and turn on Golden Girls.

Fortunately, human teachers who've somehow missed out on the billions of years of biologically evolution required to recognize the "oh face" can take advantage of this research as well. See a video demonstration of that after the break, face-controlled video here.

[Reader @ Jun 25th 2008 7:53AM]

Ohh! Ohh! Ohh! You know what I'm talkin about. Oh.

[michas_pi @ Jun 25th 2008 1:14PM]

She looks like a chick who works in Logistics.

[lawyer bird @ Jun 25th 2008 2:27PM]

if she wasn't working on facial recognition, i'd say she was mentally challenged

[ShadowKain @ Jun 25th 2008 8:04AM]

Interestin stuff

[Edd @ Jun 25th 2008 8:36AM]

Nice stuff but what a boring video

[Flashpoint @ Jun 25th 2008 8:41AM]

Your facial expressions indicate there is a 99.997% chance that you are afraid I will terminate your life functions.


*Proceeding to terminate human*

[M.Samba @ Jun 25th 2008 9:01AM]

im not sure how robots would use this against us but im sure they'd find a way

[dan @ Jun 25th 2008 9:20AM]

Unimpressive....a few years too late

ITP at NYU has been doing stuff like this for years (and I'm sure other communications Grad programs have been too)

if its a computer or robot reacting to facial expressions, its the same thing.

Don't the Logitech webcams track facial expressions too? having a computer track ones eyes and mouth then using the shape to come up with a "reaction" really isn't that hard to do using some very basic software such as proce55ing

no, really im serious, im not trolling

[Tim Brown @ Jun 25th 2008 9:43AM]

Human: (Terrified)
Robot: You will blend
Human: (blended (a rather mixed (sorry) expression))
Robot: See you dont run Crysis too well either
Me: (disappearing sounds of running feet and small cloud of dust)

[EBone @ Jun 25th 2008 11:43AM]

The expression in the top pick looks like the classic fark.com line - "Penis goes WHERE?!"

[Ian @ Jun 25th 2008 1:15PM]

ill show her my oh face!! OH OH OH

i am truly sorry.

[John H. @ Jun 25th 2008 1:24PM]

lol, meatbag expression from hk-47 on kotor

[angle45media @ Jun 25th 2008 2:10PM]

I think this is the same software big casinos in vegas use to catch blackjack card counters...better check google's patent search =D

[Tim @ Jun 25th 2008 3:17PM]

Am I the only one who saw the obvious application of this for porn, since the app already speeds up and slows down the video based on human reactions? Finally, humans no longer need to hit the progress bar back a bit on vlc to watch the good part over and over again.

[skulldriveshaft @ Jun 26th 2008 12:40AM]

billions of years of biologically evolution required to recognize the "oh face"

say wha?

I'm guess she just saw the crater zit on her nose.