Assisting the autistic with real-time facial expression recognition

People with Asperger´s Syndrome have difficulty with recognizing other people´s emotions and are therefore not able to react to it. Although there have been many attempts aimed at developing software for teaching autistic children how to deal with social situations, the idea of equipping autistic persons with tools to help them recognize emotions has not been explored. This paper presents the idea of a wearable tool that uses automatic facial expression recognition developed by the authors to assist the autistic deal with social situations. In this paper, we describe a method we have developed for facial expression recognition that operates in real time. Experimental results show that this new method is superior to analysis of only either static images or dynamic videos which are the two methods commonly used. The assistive tool as well as the facial expression recognition system that has been developed for this purpose are presented here.