TR-C-0141 :1996.3.15

リヤナゲ デ シルバ,宮里勉,岸野文郎

Evaluation of Emotion Enhanced Face to Face Meetings Which Uses the Concept of Virtual Space Teleconferencing

Abstract:本稿では、臨場感通信システムの革新性について検討する。特に感情認識と伝達について述べ、その観点での本システムの優位点を評価実験で確認する。すなわち、送信側と受信側の間に設置された、知識による感情認識と感情強調によって、より効率的な会話が実現でき、これによりface-to-face会話の欠点になっている、異文化間での感情認識の相違を乗り越えたテレビ会議を実現することが可能であることを示す。さらに、従来テレビ放送で使われているモザイクを用いたプライバシー保護を行なった場合でも話者の感情伝達を可能にする、仮想人物についても述べる。

Here we investigate the unique advantages of our proposed Virtual Space Teleconferencing System (VST) in the area of multimedia teleconferencing, with emphasis to facial emotion transmission and recognition. Specially we show that, using this concept, emotions of a local participant can be transmitted to the remote party with higher recognition rate by enhancing the emotions using some intelligence processing in between the local and the remote participants. This leads to a kind of emotion enhanced teleconferencing system which can supersede face to face meetings, by effectively alleviating the barriers in recognizing emotions between different nations. Also in this paper we state about a concept known as a virtual person, which is a better alternative to blurred or mosaiced facial images that one can find in some television interviews with people who are not willing to be exposed in public. Finally we compare the amount of data rate required for the proposed method with two other available methods, and confirm that our approach needs a very low data rate compared to those methods.