Automatic Blinking Detection towards Stress Discovery

Abstract

We present a robust method to automatically detect blinks in video sequences of conversations, aimed to discovering stress. Psychological studies have shown a relationship between blink frequency and dopamine levels, which in turn are affected by stress. Task performance correlates through an inverted U shape to both dopamine and stress levels. This shows the importance of automatic blink detection as a way of reducing human coding burden. We use an off-the-shelf face tracker in order to extract the eye region. Then, we perform per-pixel classification of the extracted eye images to later identify blinks through their dynamics. We evaluate the performance of our system with a job interview database with annotations of psychological variables, and show statistically significant correlation between perceived stress resistance and the automatically detected blink patterns.