Towards robotic facial mimicry: System development and evaluation

We introduce a facial mimicry system, which combines facial expression analysis and synthesis on a robot, utilizing the facial action coding system. The activation of action units on a user´s face is automatically extracted from a video stream and mapped to the robot, thus mirroring the facial expression. As a novel approach, a user study quantifies the congruence of the initial human facial expression with the robotic facial expression. The evaluation shows that the robotic facial expression is perceived to be close to the human facial expression, from which it is derived. This is a fundamental aspect for a mimicry system, providing a basis for future research on empathy and emotional closed loop control.