Cross-cultural design of facial expressions for humanoids: is there cultural difference between Japan and Denmark?

Abstract

In this research, the authors succeeded in creating facial expressions made with the minimum necessary elements for recognizing a face. The elements are two eyes and a mouth made using precise circles, which are transformed to make facial expressions geometrically, through rotation and vertically scaling transformation. The facial expression patterns made by the geometric elements and transformations were composed employing three dimensions of visual information that had been suggested by many previous researches, slantedness of the mouth, openness of the face, and slantedness of the eyes. The authors found that this minimal facial expressions can be classified into 10 emotions: happy, angry, sad, disgust, fear, surprised, angry*, fear*, neutral (pleasant) indicating positive emotion, and neutral (unpleasant) indicating negative emotion. The authors also investigate and report cultural differences of impressions of facial expressions of above-mentioned simplified face.