Mona Lisa: Smiling?

Reported August 2006

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Computers are becoming more and more like humans! Now, new technology allows them to detect what we're feeling!

You've heard the good and the bad about the Da Vinci Code. Now, cutting-edge technology helps unleash another Da Vinci mystery -- what the famous Mona Lisa was feeling.

Have any guesses?

Actually, the Mona Lisa's expression is 83-percent happy, 9-percent disgusted, 6-percent fearful, and two-percent angry.

A computer vision expert in Amsterdam used software developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to design emotion recognition technology. With a Web cam, they map a person's face onto a mesh computer model. It calculates the expression based on facial points like lip curvature, eyebrow position, and cheek contraction -- with 85-percent accuracy.

"That's pretty good, actually, because it's very close to what the human can do," computer scientist Nicu Sebe, Ph.D., of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, tells Ivanhoe. The software detects happiness, disgust, fear, anger, surprise and sadness, but researchers don't yet have the technology to detect more subtle emotions.

The researchers found George Bush was feeling surprise, fear and sadness during a speech regarding the war in Iraq. Michael Jackson was 33-percent fearful in his mug shot and angry and disgusted as the press snapped pictures after his trial.

Emotion-recognition technology may be used to detect that a driver is getting sleepy at the wheel and have an alert signal and to detect how you feel about certain items while you're shopping ... Proof it takes a look at the past to pave the way for the future.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Nicu Sebe, Ph.D.
Professor of Science
University of Amsterdam
Netherlands
+31-20-525-7552
nicu@science.uva.nl

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Washington, D.C. 20036-5104
(202)785-0017
ieeeusa@ieee.org
http://www.ieee.org

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