Dynamic Faces: Insights from Experiments and Computation - Hardcover

"Faces do not appear out of the blue, as frozen statues. At any moment a face will have a complex movement history that provides a feast of information about identity, speech, mood, and even physical pain. This book collates the leading work on how we understand such things from facial motion, tracking the progress made with computer science in decoding and reconstructing ever more lifelike changing faces. It is rare to see an artificial intelligence approach building on the behavioral psychology and neuroscience of dynamic face recognition. Each of these areas of endeavor is well represented, giving the book a sense of overall coherence." David Perrett, School of Psychology, St. Andrews University "Given that time and timing are central to social interaction, to the control of ongoing behavior, and indeed to phenomenal consciousness itself, the omission of dynamics from most of the attempts to date to understand face processing is puzzling. The present book goes a long way toward filling this lacuna. The editors' effective mix of chapters on psychophysics, neurobiology, and computational modeling of dynamic faces is likely to prove both a landmark and a resource for future efforts." Shimon Edelman, author of Computing the Mind: How the Mind Really Works

State-of-the-art research on the perception of dynamic faces, a topic of importance to brain, cognitive, and computational sciences. The recognition of faces is a fundamental visual function with importance for social interaction and communication. Scientific interest in facial recognition has increased dramatically over the last decade. Researchers in such fields as psychology, neurophysiology, and functional imaging have published more than 10,000 studies on face processing. Almost all of these studies focus on the processing of static pictures of faces, however, with little attention paid to the recognition of dynamic faces, faces as they change over time-a topic in neuroscience that is also relevant for a variety of technical applications, including robotics, animation, and human-computer interfaces. This volume offers a state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary overview of recent work on dynamic faces from both biological and computational perspectives. The chapters cover a broad range of topics, including the psychophysics of dynamic face perception, results from electrophysiology and imaging, clinical deficits in patients with impairments of dynamic face processing, and computational models that provide insights about the brain mechanisms for the processing of dynamic faces. The book offers neuroscientists and biologists an essential reference for designing new experiments, and provides computer scientists with knowledge that will help them improve technical systems for the recognition, processing, synthesizing, and animating of dynamic faces.