FaceXpress: An Integrated Software Suite for Facial Emotion Stimulus Manipulation and Facial Measurement

The characterisation of facial expression through landmark-based analysis methods such as FACEM (Pilowsky & Katsikitis, 1994) has a variety of uses in psychiatric and psychological research. In these systems, important structural relationships are ex-tracted from images of facial expressions by the analysis of a pre-defined set of feature points. These relationship measures may then be used, for instance, to assess the de-gree of variability and similarity between different facial expressions of emotion. FaceXpress is a multimedia software suite that provides a generalised workbench for landmark-based facial emotion analysis and stimulus manipulation. It is a flexible tool that is designed to be specialised at runtime by the user. While FaceXpress has been used to implement the FACEM process, it can also be configured to support any other similar, arbitrary system for quantifying human facial emotion. FaceXpress also im-plements an integrated set of image processing tools and specialised tools for facial ex-pression stimulus production including facial morphing routines and the generation of expression-representative line drawings from photographs