Revealing Psychophysiology and Emotions through Thermal Infrared Imaging

Abstract

Thermal infrared imaging has been proposed as a tool for the non-invasive and contact-less evaluation of vital signs, psychophysiological responses and states. Several applications have been so far developed in many diversified fields, like social and developmental psychology, psychometrics, human-computer interaction, continuous monitoring of vital signs, stress and, even, deception detection. Thermal infrared imaging has been poorly exploited in the field of human-robot interaction. Therefore, the state of the art of thermal infrared imaging in computational physiology and psychophysiology is discussed in order to provide insights about its potentialities and limits for human-robot interaction and applications with