A face based real time communication for physically and speech disabled people

The main purpose of this research is to enhance the communication of the disabled community. The authors of this chapter propose an enhanced interpersonal-human interaction for people with special needs, especially those with physical and communication disabilities. The proposed model comprises of automated real time behaviour monitoring, designed and implemented with the ubiquitous and affordable concept in mind to suit the underprivileged. In this chapter, the authors present the prototype which encapsulates an automated facial expression recognition system for monitoring the disabled, equipped with a feature to send Short Messaging System (SMS) for notification purposes. The authors adapted the Viola-Jones face detection algorithm at the face detection stage and implemented template matching technique for the expression classification and recognition stage. They tested their model with a few users and achieved satisfactory results. The enhanced real time behaviour monitoring system is an assistive tool to improve the quality of life for the disabled by assisting them anytime and anywhere when needed. They can do their own tasks more independently without constantly being monitored physically or accompanied by their care takers, teachers, or even parents. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. The background of the facial expression recognition system is reviewed in Section 2. Section 3 is the description and explanations of the conceptual model of facial expression recognition. Evaluation of the proposed system is in Section 4. Results and findings on the testing are laid out in Section 5, and the final section concludes the chapter