Researchers developed a smart necklace called NeckFace which can continuously track full facial expressions by using infrared cameras to capture images of the chin and face from beneath the neck. The team led by Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, detailed their work in “NeckFace: Continuously Tracking Full Facial Expressions on Neck-mounted Wearables,”
Neckface potentially tracks facial expressions and senses the emotions accordingly. In addition to this author’s listed many applications of the smart necklace such as video conferencing when a front-facing camera is not an option, Silent speech recognition and some significant applications in virtual reality scenarios.
“The ultimate goal is having the user be able to track their behaviors, through continuous tracking of facial movements,” said Zhang, principal investigator of the SciFi Lab. “And this hopefully can tell us a lot of information about your physical activity and mental activities.”Using deep learning calculations, the group specified that NeckFace characterized facial movement with nearly the same accuracy as the direct measurements using the phone camera.
