Extracting the Emotional and Attentive State of Students Using a Real-Time Visual Sensor

"Waveband Corporation proposes to develop a low-cost camera-based active vision system combined with an MPEG-4 compatible facial tracking solution to extract and analyze a student's basic emotional state within the framework of established psychologicalprinciples.The system, called EmoCam (Emotion Camera) uses a web & communication camera platform as a convenient and readily available sensor on a multitude of training stations and processes the received visual information in real-time on a PC-based environment.In the computer-mediated training framework the EmoCam is being prototyped, emotional signals of a student are considered as aspects of response to the educational material. Unlike in other systems the student's internal state is represented with respectto the learning/cognitive process. The ability to extract such information in real-time is critical for a new generation of computer-based learning systems that can change their teaching behavior according to the student's internal state. Therefore theEmoCam once developed will serve as a basic interface between student and any computer-mediated training solution while establishing a highly personalized and adaptive learning environment. In addition to serving the interest of a computer-mediated teaching/training instrument, the EmoCam device will also fill other niches in the consumer market. This can be illustrated by the following examples:- Automotive and Airline Industry.