Fatigue Estimation using Facial Expression features and Remote-PPG Signal

Currently, research and development of lifestyle support robots in daily life is being actively conducted. Health-case is one such function robots. In this research, we develop a fatigue estimation system using a camera that can easily be mounted on robots. Measurements taken in a real environment have to be consider noises caused by changes in light and the subject’s movement. This fatigue estimation system is based on a robust feature extraction method. As an indicator of fatigue, LF/HF-ratio was calculated from the power spectrum of RR interval in the electrocardiogram or the blood volume pulse (BVP). The BVP can be detected from the fingertip by using the photoplethysmography (PPG). In this study, we used a contactless PPG: remote-PPG (rPPG) detected by the luminance change of the face image. Some studies show facial expression features extracted from facial video are also useful for fatigue estimation. dimension reduction of past method using LLE spoiled the information in the large dimention of feature. We also developed a fatigue estimation method with such features using a camera for the healthcare robots. It used facial landmark points, line-of-sight vector, and size of the ellipse fitted with eyes and mouth landmark points. Therefore, proposed method simply use time-varying shape information of face like size of eyes, or gaze direction. We verified the performance of proposed features by the fatigue state classification using Support Vector Machine (SVM).