Computing and evaluating the Body Laughter Index

The EU-ICT FET Project ILHAIRE is aimed at endowing machines with automated detection, analysis, and synthesis of laughter. This paper describes the Body Laughter Index (BLI) for automated detection of laughter starting from the analysis of body movement captured by a video source. The BLI algorithm is described, and the index is computed on a corpus of videos. The assessment of the algorithm by means of subject’s rating is also presented. Results show that BLI can successfully distinguish between different videos of laughter, even if improvements are needed with respect to perception of subjects, multimodal fusion, cultural aspects, and generalization to a broad range of social contexts.