What the human face tells the human mind: some challenges for therobot-human interface

摘要

The human face serves a variety of different communicativefunctions in social interaction. The face mediates personidentification, the perception of emotional expressions and lipreading.Perceiving the direction of social attention, and facial attractiveness,also affect interpersonal behaviour. This paper reviews these differentuses made of facial information, and considers their computationaldemands. The possible link between the perception of faces and deeperlevels of social understanding is emphasised through a discussion ofdevelopmental deficits affecting social cognition. Finally, theimplications for the development of communication between robots andhumans is discussed. It is concluded that it could be useful both forrobots to understand human faces, and also to display human-like facialgestures themselves