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Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA)

Professor YingLi Tian from the City College of New York (CCNY) was recently selected to receive a grant from DHS University Programs to continue her collaboration with CCICADA researchers on combining gestures with facial expressions to assess a person’s emotional state or intent. This research will enhance data and visual analytic capabilities for fusing information from facial expressions and gestures that are captured in videos. It will extend previous work by Dr. Tian and her colleagues initiated through the DHS Summer Research Team Program for Minority Serving Institutions, which enabled Dr. Tian and second year graduate student, Shizhi Chen, to spend 10 weeks at CCICADA working with Rutgers faculty members Drs. Dimitris Metaxas and Qingshan Liu on this research.

Figure 1. Shizhi Chen gives a talk on facial and gesture analysis research at CCICADA.

Figure 2. Dr. YingLi Tian gives a talk on facial and gesture analysis research at CCICADA.

Their research will provide more powerful capabilities for lie detection, person identification, pain assessment, and depression recognition that can be deployed in a wide variety of homeland security settings ranging from transportation security and border protection to intelligence gathering and first response.  

Existing work in this topic requires two separate video channels – one for isolating facial features and another for body gestures.  One of the goals of the new project is to perform feature extraction and affect recognition using a single video channel containing both facial features and body gestures.

Dr. Tian is currently an associate professor in Department of Electrical Engineering at the CCNY. Her research examines a wide range of computer vision problems from motion detection, to activity analysis, facial expression analysis, and assertive system to help blind/visually impaired people.

For more information about the DHS University Programs Grant program, visit: http://www.hsuniversityprograms.org/.