A $P recognizer for automatic facial emotion recognition using Kinect sensor

Autism is a developmental disorder involving qualitative impairments in social interaction. One source of those impairments are difficulties with facial expressions of emotion. Autistic people often have difficulty to recognize or to understand other people's emotions and feelings, or expressing their own. This work proposes a method to automatically recognize seven basic emotions among autistic children in real time: Happiness, Anger, Sadness, Surprise, Fear, Disgust, and Neutral. The method uses the Microsoft Kinect sensor to track and identify points of interest from the 3D face model and it is based on the $P point-cloud recognizer to identify multi-stroke emotions as point-clouds. The experimental results show that our system can achieve above 94.28% recognition rate. Our study provides a novel clinical tool to help children with autism to assisting doctors in operating rooms.