Evaluation of Synthetic Faces: Human Recognition of Emotional Facial Displays

Despite the growing attention towards the communication adequacy of embodied conversational agents (ECAs), standards for their assessment are still missing. This paper reports about a methodology for the evaluation of the adequacy of facial displays in the expression of some basic emotional states, based on a recognition task. We consider recognition rates and error distribution, both in absolute terms and with respect to a human model. As to data analysis, we propose to resort to standard loglinear techniques and to information-theoretic ones. Results from an experiment are presented and the potentials of the methodology are discussed.