The Research Project

So I am finally getting my research problem narrowed down. In case you are interested, here is what would essentially be the abstract to a proposal paper for the project:

We are planning to conduct an experiment to measure what parts of a Duchenne smile people use to evaluate if an animated smile is genuine or sincere. We are choosing to focus on the the dynamics of the smile, rather than static modeling methods or techniques. Previous work in this area has primarily dealt with the attack, sustain, and release timing of various elements of the smile. We plan to focus mainly on the intensity of a particular element, while matching the timing to actual data of people smiling. We will be recording people watching videos that invoke positive emotion, so that we can record the natural and sincere smiles produced. We will then record the people, while we ask them to respond to prompts, by voluntarily smiling based off a situation presented in the prompt. Using this data we will use Active Appearance Models to analyze various measurements, such as cheek displacement, eyebrow displacement, and upper and lower eyelid displacement. We also plan to analyze the existence of crow's feet and develop a quantifiable measurement that can be used for animation. Next, we will develop a series of smile animations, each with varying intensities of the previously mentioned elements. We will then use these animations in a survey, asking people to rate how natural, sincere, and genuine the smiles are. We will also keep track of the time it takes for people to make their decisions about each smile as another possible measure of analysis. Lastly, we will use statistical analysis to evaluate how much each of the various elements of an animated Duchenne smile affect a person's perception of that smile.