Emotional face expression profiles supported by virtual human ontology

Abstract

Expressive facial animation synthesis of human like characters has had many approaches with good results. MPEG-4 standard has functioned as the basis of many of those approaches. In this paper we would like to lay out the knowledge of some of those approaches inside an ontology in order to support the modeling of emotional facial animation in virtual humans (VH). Inside this ontology we will present MPEG-4 facial animation concepts and its relationship with emotion through expression profiles that utilize psychological models of emotions. The ontology allows storing, indexing and retrieving prerecorded synthetic facial animations that can express a given emotion. Also this ontology can be used a refined knowledge base in regards to the emotional facial animation creation. This ontology is made using Web Ontology Language and the results are presented as answered queries.

An Ontology for Semantic Modelling of Virtual World

“…We can divide the use of ontologies in the domain of Virtual Environments into three uses; the first use: Ontologies in the context of Virtual Environments [21,22], the second use: Ontology for interactive Virtual Environments [23,24], the third use: Ontology for Virtual Humans [19,25].…”

Modelling multimodal expression of emotion in a virtual agent

“…The distance from this point to the centre of the disc represents the intensity of the expression. This approach of bilinear combination of expressions has been extended to more complex models (Tsapatsoulis et al 2002;Albrecht et al 2005;Garcia-Rojas et al 2006). These models use a dimensional representation of the emotions (Plutchik 1980;Whissel 1989).…”

“…These models use a dimensional representation of the emotions (Plutchik 1980;Whissel 1989). The representation can be in two-dimensional with the axes arousal and valence (Tsapatsoulis et al 2002;Garcia-Rojas et al 2006) or in three-dimensional with the axes arousal, valence and power (Albrecht et al 2005). A new expression is obtained by combining the expressions of the closest basic emotions in the representation space.…”

Using pluggable procedures and ontology to realize semantic virtual environments 2.0

“…Instead of dealing with human shapes, the work in (Abaci et al, 2005) focuses on adding action semantics in smart objects to facilitate the interaction between the avatars and with the objects in the virtual environment. Garcia-Rojas et al (2006) also proposed to add semantic information, such as emotion and expressiveness, to animations in order to facilitate the selection of appropriate animation clips for a specific scenario.…”