The inventor of MP3 music files, Fraunhofer IIS, has created the world’s first emotion detection app for the Google Glass wearable computer.
With the aid of the integrated camera inside Google Glass, Fraunhofer IIS has adapted its real-time face detection and analysis software to determine emotions by analysing facial expressions.
The app also gauges a person’s age and detects their gender among other things – but we’re told it cannot determine their identity.
It’s the first emotion recognition software in the world to function in real-time with Google Glass, with all calculations performed by the CPU integrated in the eyewear – image data never leaves the device.
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| Frauhofer’s app in action. |
Fraunhofer IIS says this “opens up an entire spectrum of new smart eyewear applications, including communication aids for people with disorders such as autism, many of whom have difficulty interpreting emotions through facial expressions.”
This missing information could be superimposed in the person’s field of vision with data glasses.
Even the visually impaired can benefit from the new software by receiving supplementary audio information about people in their surroundings.
The app could also be used in other applications such as interactive games or market research analyses, taking advantage of the additional capability to determine someone’s gender or estimate their age.
It’s all possible thanks to Fraunhofer’s SHORE-branded face detection and analysis software and the Company’s participation in the Google Glass Explorer program.
This gave the Company the opportunity to test the smart eyewear before it was introduced to the market.
Fraunhofer says SHORE is “the culmination of years of R&D work in the field of intelligent systems, which resulted in the creation of a highly-efficient real-time C++ software library”, with the software enabling “the detection of objects and faces, as well as detailed facial analyses.”
Thanks to the high degree of optimisation, the Company says SHORE “can be adapted to nearly any platform and operating system, especially mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.”
Fraunhofer’s researchers also have extensive experience in the development of miniaturised and intelligent cameras and the corresponding algorithms, with this know-how a major factor in the high-performance development of the SHORE-based Google Glass app.
A YouTube video showing how it all works is embedded below.
