Abstract
In late years, it has been expected that a method for estimating psychological conditions based on biosignals be applied to various fields like welfare, education and industry from the viewpoint of man-machine interface. For avoiding physical and mental constraining feelings, it would be preferable to detect biosignals without putting sensors on subjects. Therefore, we use an infrared ray camera with contactless method as our measurement, and evaluate unpleasant mood by facial images. We did this experiment under the conditions of room temperature of 23 &pluemn;1.0 °C, illumination of 200lx, and perfect calm environment. We set an infrared ray camera TVS-600 at the horizontal distance of 1.0m from subject's face. For extracting the facial image, the image size of the camera is 320 X 236 pixel, temperature resolution is &pluemn;0.1 °C, and skin emissivity is 0.98. Beginning of the experiment, subjects sit just 3 minutes with their eyes open, and kept quiet in order to accommodate with experimental condition. Then, we showed them some kinds of unpleasant pictures, and took thermal facial images. Analysis of individual thermal images revealed that 3 of the 5 subjects showed thermal change. Considering future applications to patients who cannot show emotion by facial expression or utterance because of disease such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this study.
