Contactless detection of facial signs related to stress: A preliminary study

This paper presents a contactless methodology for detecting facial signs related to stress. A brief literature review shows that there are specific facial signs that are related to stressful conditions. A methodology based on computer vision techniques applied to color videos in order to extract facial signs such as movement (head), eyebrow lowering and raising, and blink rate is presented. Various facial features are investigated and are quantitatively evaluated through a frame-to-frame analysis. Preliminary results with few volunteers reveal a direct correlation of the selected facial signs with stress conditions. These initial results confirm our hypothesis regarding the possibility of assessing stress from facial expressions. However, these preliminary results should be quantitatively verified on a more comprehensive dataset containing a significant number of subjects in order to validate the algorithm results.