Emotion recognition in autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Figure 1: The emotion happiness shown by a female virtual character rendered realistic (left) and in different stylized variants. AbstractWe investigate the effect that stylized facial expressions have on the perception and categorization of emotions by participants with highfunctioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in contrast to two control samples: one with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and one with neurotypically developed peers (NTD). Realtime Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) techniques with different levels of abstraction are applied to stylize two animated virtual characters performing expressions for six basic emotions. Our results show that the accuracy rates of the ASD group were unaffected by the NPR styles and reached about the same performance as for the characters with realistic-looking appearance. This effect, however, was not seen in the ADHD and NTD groups.

Interactive testbed for research in autism—the SARA project

“…No subjects with ASD were considered, as the aim was to validate the developed NPR styles. The final experiment is described in [35].…”