Human facial movements convey emotions, and help us communicate nonverbally and perform physical activities, such as eating and drinking. Tracking fac

Smart necklace could track your detailed facial expressions | Cornell Chronicle

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2021-08-02 17:00:08

Human facial movements convey emotions, and help us communicate nonverbally and perform physical activities, such as eating and drinking.

Tracking facial movements – and possibly their cause – is one of the proposed applications for NeckFace, one of the first necklace-type wearable sensing technologies. A team led by Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, has developed NeckFace, which can continuously track full facial expressions by using infrared cameras to capture images of the chin and face from beneath the neck.

Their work is detailed in “NeckFace: Continuously Tracking Full Facial Expressions on Neck-mounted Wearables,” which was published June 24 in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.

Co-lead authors are Tuochao Chen (from Peking University) and Yaxuan Li (from McGill University), visiting students in the Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab, and Cornell MPS student Songyun Tao. Other contributors are HyunChul Lim, Mose Sakashita and Ruidong Zhang, Cornell Ph.D. students in the field of information science, and François Guimbretière, professor of information science in the Cornell Bowers College.