In a Facial Expression Recognition (FER) system, appropriate representation of facial features from relevant face regions play crucial role in robust detection of facial actions units (AUs) under realistic conditions like wide range of illumination variations, presence of tracking errors, inter person expression variations, partial occlusion of faces, etc. In this work, we perform an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art FER techniques to further understand their performance gaps under realistic conditions. We propose an appropriate Region Of Interest (ROI) selection strategy for each AU and also an appropriately designed robust Local Binary Pattern (LBP) based descriptor that applies spatially spinning bin support for histogram computation. We show that the proposed solutions are capable of addressing performance gaps seen in existing approaches. The ROI strategy present here gives a better trade-off in eliminating inter AU correlations while modeling AUs and minimizes the constraints on the accuracy of facial feature localization. The proposed spin support based feature descriptor provides unique representation for AUs by encoding both appearance and geometry of the facial features in its description and results in a better detection accuracy. We compare the performance of the proposed solutions with the key state-of-the-art techniques and show clear improvement on benchmark databases like CK+, ISL, FACS, JAFFE, MultiPie, MindReading and also on an internally collected real-world data.

This paper describes a conference which linked several remote sites via a virtual environment so that the virtual audience could follow the presentations and interact with real presenters. The aim was to assess the feasibility of linking distributed virtual audiences to an ongoing conference event. Various types of data about the conference were gathered, such as participant observations, interviews and a survey of the audience, and analyzed. The main finding is that a number of `low tech' improvements could be made that could greatly enhance this type of virtual conferencing. A related finding is that the visual fidelity of the environment and of the avatars plays a lesser role than other factors such as audio quality. Given the paucity of research on how virtual conferencing can substitute for travel, plus the urgency of this topic for environmental reasons, a number of suggestions are made for the implementation of remote virtual conference participation.