Facial
expression analysis software has been used extensively in various
fields, primarily in marketing and medicine, to measure a person's
sentiment and use the feedback to change the approach when trying to
sell a certain product to a customer, or for assessment of pain in
patients. Additionally, it can also help improve traffic safety,
since it can detect driver drowsiness and prevent crashes caused by
fatigued drivers. There are a few other ways that this technology can
enhance driver safety, as it has the ability to recognize the
universal facial expressions of emotion - surprise, fear, sadness,
disgust, anger, joy, and contempt, and it's a fact that emotions have
a significant effect on a person's driving abilities.

The
impact of specific emotions on people's driving skills is exactly
what a team of researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne (EPFL) wanted to investigate, so they have partnered up with
PSA Peugeot Citroen to develop an emotion detector that can be
mounted on a car's dashboard and measure drivers' emotions. Their
system employs an infrared camera that is attached behind the
steering wheel, that monitors the driver's face at all times,
tracking specific movements of the musculature of the face, which can
reveal what emotion the driver is feeling at a given moment.
Hua
Gao and Anil Yüce, who led the research, found that it was very
difficult to determine when a driver is irritated, because each
person expresses this feeling in a different way, so they decided to
focus on two emotions that can be easily identified: anger and
disgust. Based on the movements of a driver's eyes, nose and mouth,
the software can detect when they are feeling angry or disgusted,
which indicates that they are under stress and they are at risk of
overreacting in a certain driving situation, leading to road rage,
which is one of the most common causes of car accidents. If the
system determines that you are angry or disgusted, it informs you
that you have the symptoms of road rage. In this case, you should
pull over to the side of the road and take a couple of minutes to
calm down.
Hopefully,
as the technology develops further, it will be able to connect with
cars' steering and braking system, so that it can apply the brakes
for you in case it detects you are driving too aggressively and you
are about to hit the vehicle in front of you, or prevent you from
making a sharp turn and drift away from your lane.
In
the future, the system is likely to be updated, so that it can detect driver distraction, looking for signs that indicate that a driver has
taken his/her eyes off the road, as well as signs of fatigue, by
measuring the percentage of eyelid closure.
The
findings from this research can be very useful to developers of
semi-autonomous vehicles, which can use this type of software to help
cars identify the emotional state of the driver and decide whether
they should perform the most important driving tasks or allow the
driver to continue operating the vehicle.
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