SEOUL: Scientists have developed a new facial expression recognition system that can tell, with almost 99 per cent accuracy, if you are happy, sad or showing any other emotion.

Capturing emotions of players could be used in interactive games for various purposes, such as transferring the player's emotions to his or her avatar, or activating suitable actions to communicate with other players in various scenarios including educational applications, researchers said.

Researchers from Soongsil University in South Korea and Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City, developed a simple, fast system that they have shown to be almost 99 per cent accurate on thousands of test facial images.

Fundamentally, the system uses mathematical processing to measure eyebrow position, the openness of the eyes, mouth shape and other factors in order to correlate those with basic human emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise and a neutral expression.

The system can work even on images of faces just 48 pixels square.

Facial expression recognition has been the focus of much research in recent years, thanks to the emergence of intelligence communication systems, data-driven animation and intelligent game applications, the researchers said.

"When facial expressions recognition of players is applied in an intelligent game system, the experience can become more interactive, vivid and attractive," they said.

One might also imagine that the same system could be used to track the emotional expressions of actors voicing the characters in animated movies and other media for more realistic real-time emotional expression.

The study was published in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics.

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