Hi Padmanabham, it's really greate. The next step will be, our mobile phone
recognizing an individual and saying "mr/mrs/ms so and so is smiling."
----- Original Message -----
From: "padmanabham" <[email protected]>
To: "access india" <[email protected]>
Cc: "blind city" <[email protected]>; "bsftb"
<[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 4:30 PM
Subject: [AI] new technology helps visually impaired to see emotions
Without vision it's impossible to interpret facial expressions, or so it's
believed. Not any more. Shafiq ur Réhman, Umeå University, presents a new
technology in his doctoral thesis - a Braille code of emotions.
"It gives new opportunities for social interactions for the visually
impaired," he says.
Lacking the sense of vision can be very limiting in a person's daily life.
The most obvious limitation is probably the difficulty of navigation, but
small details in everyday life, which seeing people take for granted, are
also missed. One of those things is the ability to see a person during a
conversation. Facial expressions provide emotional information and are
important in communication. A smile shows pleasure, amusement, relief, etc.
Missing information from facial expressions create barriers to social
interactions.
"Blind persons compensate for missing information with other senses such as
sound. But it is difficult to understand complex emotions with voice alone,"
says Shafiq ur Réhman.
His thesis addresses a challenging problem: how to let visually impaired
"see" others' emotions. To make this possible the research group has
developed a new technology based on an ordinary web camera, hardware as
small as a coin, and a tactile display. This enables the visually impaired
to directly interpret human emotions.
"Visual information is transferred from the camera into advanced vibrating
patterns displayed on the skin. The vibrators are sequentially activated to
provide dynamic information about what kind of emotion a person is
expressing and the intensity of the emotion," he explains.
The first step for a user is to learn the patterns of different facial
expressions by using displaying the emotions in front of a camera that
translates the emotions into vibrational patterns. In this learning phase
the visually impaired person have a tactile display mounted on the back of a
chair. When interacting with other people a sling on the forearm can be used
instead.
The main research focus has been to characterise different emotions and to
find a way to present them by means of advanced biomedical engineering and
computer vision technologies. The project was founded by the Swedish
Research Council.
The research group's spin-off company Videoakt AB has been granted a patent
for the technology, which soon will be available as a product on the open
market. Tactile feedback is also interesting in other areas as a future
communication tool, for seeing people as well.
"We have successfully demonstrated how the technology can be implemented on
mobile phones for tactile rendering of live football games and human emotion
information through vibrations. This is an interesting way to enhance the
experience of mobile users," explains Shafiq ur Réhman.
On Wednesday, 28 April, Shafiq ur Réhman, Department of Applied Physics and
Electronics, Umeå University, will defend his doctoral thesis, titled
Expressing Emotions through Vibration.
The dissertation will take place at 9:00 a.m. in N300, Natural Sciences
Building, Umeå University. The faculty opponent will be Professor Xiaoyi
Jiang, University of Munster, Germany.
For further information, please contact:
Shafiq ur Réhman
Phone: +46 90-7869373, +46 73 6953678
E-mail: [email protected]
Referenslänk: Electronical publication of the doctoral thesis.
Get numbers right this time, help the census with correct disability info!
Question 9 relates to disability.
Get numbers right this time, help the census with correct disability info!
Question 9 relates to disability.
