Project Details
Projekt
Impact of non-photorealistic rendering for the understanding of emotional facial expressions by children and adolescents with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders
Subject Area
Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Term
from 2013 to 2017
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 233623354
The project deals with creating and animating computer-generated facial expressions in different levels of abstraction for the purpose of investigating how they are perceived by subjects with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In a dialog with a virtual character we will test the ability of non-neurotypical children and young teenagers to read emotional states in the face of the characters. In contrast to previous works we want to conduct interactive experiments that allow the experimenter to adapt in real-time to the situation.The three partners provide unique expertise for this research project: the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg is a world-known institution for computer animation that has to its credits the development of the Filmakademie Application Framework (Frapper), a system for facial animation, among other features, that is used in many films and that was also applied in a preliminary study with University of Freiburg for psychological experiments. The University of Freiburg is a leading center for investigating Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorders, having obtained important results in the past. The University of Konstanz has great expertise in Non-photorealistic Rendering and computer-generated abstraction, becoming an important reference in the Computer Graphics community. It has an ongoing collaboration with Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and already created prototypical artistic rendering methods in Frapper that were used in two animation films. The proposed project wants to bring together the three institutions in a three-year project. The University of Konstanz will develop coherent and steerable abstraction methods for facial animations in a number of styles. The Filmakademie will integrate these methods in their application framework to extend it and to integrate it into interactive experiments, allowing the experimenter to influence rendering style, level of abstraction, mental state of the virtual character. The University of Freiburg will use the virtual characters for their experiments, while providing help to Konstanz and the Filmakademie to design more accurate and effective abstraction methods for the framework.Aside from supporting psychological tests the abstraction methods for faces are also very important for Computer Graphics. Many applications ranging from Computer Animation, virtual Avatars to dialogue and help systems will benefit from characters that can be displayed in various degrees of detail in dependence to the application. The development of various steerable non-photorealistic rendering techniques and their integration into a real-time animation system will enable a new quality of human-computer interaction in which the displayed character is represented in an intended degree of abstraction.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
