Body gesture and facial expression analysis for automatic affect recognition

This Chapter describes affect sensitivity as an important requirement for an affectively competent agent. An affectively competent agent should be able to exploit affect sensitivity abilities to successfully interact with human users: the perception and interpretation of affective states and expressions is important for such an agent to act more socially and engage with users in truly natural interaction. In this Chapter, affective facial and bodily expressions are addressed as channels for the communication of affect that must be taken into account in the design of an affect recognition system. A survey of state of the art computational approaches for affect recognition, based on the automatic analysis of facial and bodily expressions and their combined information, is presented. Relevant contributions in the field are reviewed and affect sensitivity is discussed with respect to key issues that arise in the design of an automatic system for affect recognition. This Chapter draws particular attention to a number of challenges in face and body affect recognition research that have to be addressed in a more comprehensive manner in order to successfully design an affectively competent agent. comprehensive manner in order to successfully design an affectively competent agent.