A digital signal processing approach for affective sensing of a computer user through pupil diameter monitoring

Recent research has indicated that the pupil diameter (PD) in humans varies with their affective states. However, this signal has not been fully investigated for affective sensing purposes in human-computer interaction systems. This may be due to the dominant separate effect of the pupillary light reflex (PLR), which shrinks the pupil when light intensity increases. In this dissertation, an adaptive interference canceller (AIC) system using the H∞ time-varying (HITV) adaptive algorithm was developed to minimize the impact of the PLR on the measured pupil diameter signal. The modified pupil diameter (MPD) signal, obtained from the AIC was expected to reflect primarily the pupillary affective responses (PAR) of the subject. Additional manipulations of the AIC output resulted in a processed MPD (PMPD) signal, from which a classification feature, PMPDmean, was extracted. This feature was used to train and test a support vector machine (SVM), for the identification of stress states in the subject from whom the pupil diameter signal was recorded, achieving an accuracy rate of 77.78%. The advantages of affective recognition through the PD signal were verified by comparatively investigating the classification of stress and relaxation states through features derived from the simultaneously recorded galvanic skin response (GSR) and blood volume pulse (BVP) signals, with and without the PD feature. The discriminating potential of each individual feature extracted from GSR, BVP and PD was studied by analysis of its receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The ROC curve found for the PMPDmean feature encompassed the largest area (0.8546) of all the single-feature ROCs investigated. The encouraging results seen in affective sensing based on pupil diameter monitoring were obtained in spite of intermittent illumination increases purposely introduced during the experiments. Therefore, these results confirmed the benefits of using the AIC implementation with the HITV adaptive algorithm to isolate the PAR and the potential of using PD monitoring to sense the evolving affective states of a computer user.

Off-line and on-line affective recognition of a computer user through a biosignal processing approach

Physiological signals, which are controlled by the autonomic nervous system (ANS), could be used to detect the affective state of computer users and therefore find applications in medicine and engineering. The Pupil Diameter (PD) seems to provide a strong indication of the affective state, as found by previous research, but it has not been investigated fully yet. ^ In this study, new approaches based on monitoring and processing the PD signal for off-line and on-line affective assessment ("relaxation" vs. "stress") are proposed. Wavelet denoising and Kalman filtering methods are first used to remove abrupt changes in the raw Pupil Diameter (PD) signal. Then three features (PDmean, PDmax and PDWalsh) are extracted from the preprocessed PD signal for the affective state classification. In order to select more relevant and reliable physiological data for further analysis, two types of data selection methods are applied, which are based on the paired t-test and subject self-evaluation, respectively. In addition, five different kinds of the classifiers are implemented on the selected data, which achieve average accuracies up to 86.43% and 87.20%, respectively. Finally, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is utilized to investigate the discriminating potential of each individual feature by evaluation of the area under the ROC curve, which reaches values above 0.90. ^ For the on-line affective assessment, a hard threshold is implemented first in order to remove the eye blinks from the PD signal and then a moving average window is utilized to obtain the representative value PDr for every one-second time interval of PD. There are three main steps for the on-line affective assessment algorithm, which are preparation, feature-based decision voting and affective determination. The final results show that the accuracies are 72.30% and 73.55% for the data subsets, which were respectively chosen using two types of data selection methods (paired t-test and subject self-evaluation). ^ In order to further analyze the efficiency of affective recognition through the PD signal, the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) was also monitored and processed. The highest affective assessment classification rate obtained from GSR processing is only 63.57% (based on the off-line processing algorithm). The overall results confirm that the PD signal should be considered as one of the most powerful physiological signals to involve in future automated real-time affective recognition systems, especially for detecting the "relaxation" vs. "stress" states.^

A Digital Signal Processing Approach for Affective Sensing of a Computer User through Pupil Diameter Monitoring

Recent research has indicated that the pupil diameter (PD) in humans varies with their affective states. However, this signal has not been fully investigated for affective sensing purposes in human-computer interaction systems. This may be due to the dominant separate effect of the pupillary light reflex (PLR), which shrinks the pupil when light intensity increases. In this dissertation, an adaptive interference canceller (AIC) system using the H∞ time-varying (HITV) adaptive algorithm was developed to minimize the impact of the PLR on the measured pupil diameter signal. The modified pupil diameter (MPD) signal, obtained from the AIC was expected to reflect primarily the pupillary affective responses (PAR) of the subject. Additional manipulations of the AIC output resulted in a processed MPD (PMPD) signal, from which a classification feature, PMPDmean, was extracted. This feature was used to train and test a support vector machine (SVM), for the identification of stress states in the subject from whom the pupil diameter signal was recorded, achieving an accuracy rate of 77.78%. The advantages of affective recognition through the PD signal were verified by comparatively investigating the classification of stress and relaxation states through features derived from the simultaneously recorded galvanic skin response (GSR) and blood volume pulse (BVP) signals, with and without the PD feature. The discriminating potential of each individual feature extracted from GSR, BVP and PD was studied by analysis of its receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The ROC curve found for the PMPDmean feature encompassed the largest area (0.8546) of all the single-feature ROCs investigated. The encouraging results seen in affective sensing based on pupil diameter monitoring were obtained in spite of intermittent illumination increases purposely introduced during the experiments. Therefore, these results confirmed the benefits of using the AIC implementation with the HITV adaptive algorithm to isolate the PAR and the potential of using PD monitoring to sense the evolving affective states of a computer user.

Off-line and On-line Affective Recognition of a Computer User through A Biosignal Processing Approach

Physiological signals, which are controlled by the autonomic nervous system (ANS), could be used to detect the affective state of computer users and therefore find applications in medicine and engineering. The Pupil Diameter (PD) seems to provide a strong indication of the affective state, as found by previous research, but it has not been investigated fully yet. In this study, new approaches based on monitoring and processing the PD signal for off-line and on-line affective assessment (“relaxation” vs. “stress”) are proposed. Wavelet denoising and Kalman filtering methods are first used to remove abrupt changes in the raw Pupil Diameter (PD) signal. Then three features (PDmean, PDmax and PDWalsh) are extracted from the preprocessed PD signal for the affective state classification. In order to select more relevant and reliable physiological data for further analysis, two types of data selection methods are applied, which are based on the paired t-test and subject self-evaluation, respectively. In addition, five different kinds of the classifiers are implemented on the selected data, which achieve average accuracies up to 86.43% and 87.20%, respectively. Finally, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is utilized to investigate the discriminating potential of each individual feature by evaluation of the area under the ROC curve, which reaches values above 0.90. For the on-line affective assessment, a hard threshold is implemented first in order to remove the eye blinks from the PD signal and then a moving average window is utilized to obtain the representative value PDr for every one-second time interval of PD. There are three main steps for the on-line affective assessment algorithm, which are preparation, feature-based decision voting and affective determination. The final results show that the accuracies are 72.30% and 73.55% for the data subsets, which were respectively chosen using two types of data selection methods (paired t-test and subject self-evaluation). In order to further analyze the efficiency of affective recognition through the PD signal, the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) was also monitored and processed. The highest affective assessment classification rate obtained from GSR processing is only 63.57% (based on the off-line processing algorithm). The overall results confirm that the PD signal should be considered as one of the most powerful physiological signals to involve in future automated real-time affective recognition systems, especially for detecting the “relaxation” vs. “stress” states.