What should be taught first: the emotional expression or the face?

S. Boucenna (1) , P. Gaussier (1) , P. Andry (1)

1 ETIS - UMR 8051 - Equipes Traitement de l'Information et Systèmes

We are interested in knowing how a robot head can learn to recognize facial expressions without supervision. Our starting point is a mathematical model showing that a sensory-motor architecture is able to express its emotions succeedes to recognize on-line the facial expression of a caregiver if this latter naturally tends to imitate or to resonate with the system. Interestingly, our works also show that, learning autonomously to recognize a face/non face is more complex than to recognize a facial expression. We propose an architecture using the interaction rhythm to allow first a robust learning of the facial expression without a face tracking and next to perform the learning of the face/non face recognition. Finally we emphasize the importance of the emotions as a mechanism to ensure the dynamical coupling between individuals allowing to learn more and more complex tasks.

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Réseau de neurones [cs.NE]; Robotique [cs.RO]

S. Boucenna, P. Gaussier, P. Andry. What should be taught first: the emotional expression or the face?. epirob, 2008, France. ⟨hal-00522705⟩