SMAD: LPL software to measure the intensity of smile

We are pleased to announce the publication of the article "Automatic tool to annotate smile intensities in conversational face-to-face interactions" by Stéphane Rauzy (CNRS research engineer) and Mary Amoyal (former LPL doctoral student) in the journal Gesture.

It can be downloaded free of charge from the HAL platform: https://hal.science/hal-04194987/

Reference: Stéphane Rauzy, Mary Amoyal. Automatic tool to annotate smile intensities in conversational face-to-face interactions. Gesture, September 2023 ⟨10.1075/gest.22012.rau⟩. ⟨hal-04194987⟩

Abstract:
This study presents an automatic tool that allows to trace smile intensities along a video record of conversational face-to-face interactions. The processed output proposes a sequence of adjusted time intervals labeled following the Smiling Intensity Scale ( Gironzetti, Attardo, and Pickering, 2016 ), a 5 levels scale varying from neutral facial expression to laughing smile. The underlying statistical model of this tool is trained on a manually annotated corpus of conversations featuring spontaneous facial expressions. This model will be detailed in this study. This tool can be used with benefits for annotating smile in interactions. The results are twofold. First, the evaluation reveals an observed agreement of 68% between manual and automatic annotations. Second, manually correcting the labels and interval boundaries of the automatic outputs reduces by a factor 10 the annotation time as compared with the time spent for manually annotating smile intensities without pretreatment. Our annotation engine makes use of the state-of-the-art toolbox OpenFace for tracking the face and for measuring the intensities of the facial Action Units of interest all along the video. The documentation and the scripts of our tool, the SMAD software, are available to download at the HMAD open source project URL page https://github.com/srauzy/HMAD.

 

Photo credits: S. Rauzy & M. Amoyal

“Open Science Award for Open Source Research Software” ceremony

“Open Science Award for Open Source Research Software” ceremony

& Inauguration of the national research data portal

On July 8, the inauguration of the national federated research data platform Recherche Data Gouv will take place, followed by the ceremony of 2022 Open Science Award for Open Source Research Software.

As a reminder, the SPPAS automatic annotation software developed at LPL by Brigitte Bigi, CNRS researcher, is among the 2022 winners.

SPPAS honored at the CNRS Institute for Humanities and Social Science (INSHS)

The INSHS has just published a nice article about the SPPAS software rewarded at the beginning of February on the occasion of the Open Science European Conference (see announcement below).

Online article (in French): Le logiciel SPPAS récompensé lors de la remise des Prix science ouverte du logiciel libre de la recherche | INSHS (cnrs.fr)

More information: SPPAS software rewarded at the "Open science prize for free research software" - Laboratoire Parole et Langage (lpl-aix.fr)