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Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) has become increasingly addressed in research and applications. This work proposes a system for emotion recognition in children, recording facial images by both visual (RGB&mdash, red, green and blue) and Infrared Thermal Imaging (IRTI) cameras. For this purpose, the Viola-Jones algorithm is used on color images to detect facial regions of interest (ROIs), which are transferred to the thermal camera plane by multiplying a homography matrix obtained through the calibration process of the camera system. As a novelty, we propose to compute the error probability for each ROI located over thermal images, using a reference frame manually marked by a trained expert, in order to choose that ROI better placed according to the expert criteria. Then, this selected ROI is used to relocate the other ROIs, increasing the concordance with respect to the reference manual annotations. Afterwards, other methods for feature extraction, dimensionality reduction through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and pattern classification by Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) are applied to infer emotions. The results show that our approach for ROI locations may track facial landmarks with significant low errors with respect to the traditional Viola-Jones algorithm. These ROIs have shown to be relevant for recognition of five emotions, specifically disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, with our recognition system based on PCA and LDA achieving mean accuracy (ACC) and Kappa values of 85.75% and 81.84%, respectively. As a second stage, the proposed recognition system was trained with a dataset of thermal images, collected on 28 typically developing children, in order to infer one of five basic emotions (disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) during a child-robot interaction. The results show that our system can be integrated to a social robot to infer child emotions during a child-robot interaction.

Assistive robotics is a field that has gained more visibility recently due to the social impacts it can provide. Currently, robots can be used to assist people in mobility, healthcare and even in behavioral issues, and thus, they are also known as social robots. This work shows the first contact of typically developing children with a robot, which will be used for interaction with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder further. The first contact with typically developed children is important to know if the robot is able to catch their interests and, which improvements the children would recommend about the robot shape and behavior. In total, 36 typically developing children had a first contact with the social robot and the experiment took place in elementary schools. Social skills, such as eye gaze, tactile interaction, communication, proximity and social engagement were evaluated. Surveys asked about the facial expressions of the robot and children’s likes, dislikes and feelings. The results showed that the children performed the social abilities satisfactorily, understood the robot emotional facial expressions easily, liked the robot and suggested improvements.

Human-machine interaction has growing interest in studies about recognition of human emotions since these are relevant to the establishment of social relationships. Some markers of human emotions are physiological signals, such as heartbeat, brain signals, sweating and skin temperature. Many of them are captured through sensors with contact with the body, however, contact-free (unobtrusive) sensors are currently studied targeting those people who have sensitivity to touch, such as the case of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). InfraRed Thermal Imaging (IRTI) is an unobtrusive technique for recording thermal variations on the skin. The goal of this work is to investigate the thermal variation from two emotions (happiness and sadness) on the face of five typically developing children through IRTI. The facial regions of interest (ROI) are forehead, cheeks, tip of nose and periorbital. This investigation is based on the brightness variation between the exposition to two emotional stimuli (evoked by videos) and the absence of stimuli (baseline). Values from Student’s t-test indicated significant differences between both emotional states (positive/happiness, and negative/sadness) and the baseline.

Com o intuito de fomentar a programação avançada entre os alunos capixabas de informática, o Programa de Educação Tutorial (PET) de Engenharia de Computação da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES) realiza anualmente o evento TopCom como um preparatório para competições de programação. Neste artigo são discutidos os processos para a realização de tal evento e sua importância para o meio acadêmico do Espírito Santo.