Abstract
The purpose of this study is to establish an evaluation method of ride quality on board vehicles by using human facial expression as an objective physiological index. In the previous report, the authors have introduced the concept of the Fourier Descriptor (FD) into evaluation of facial expression, and they concluded that the FD method is useful for quantitatively expressing an enclosed facial factor such as an eye. This paper deals with the application of FD to the outline of eye and mouth and the analysis of the relation of these FDs to his/her mental situation. The subjects are asked to exhibit the six fundamental emotions defined in the field of psychology and the FDs were obtained from the shape of their eye and mouth. The discriminant analysis was applied to classify facial expressions into the six fundamental emotions and it was found that the optimised model with a comparatively small number of FDs could be discriminating with a high discrimination rate.
