General Information

Linguistic and paralinguistic analysis of speech will be investigated systematically, creating a prototype that is able to analyse and respond to its users' commands, taking into account the cues about their emotional state. Analysis of facial expressions, especially in the framework of the MPEG-4 standard, constitutes another input for retrieving cues about the user's emotional state. Facial expression analysis will be applied separately, or combined with emotional speech analysis. The ERMIS system will be able to rely on prior knowledge related to the emotional analysis of speech and/or facial expressions,and to accommodate for the different expressive styles of humans. The continuity of emotion space, the uncertainty involved in the feature estimation process and the required ability of the system to use prior knowledge, while being also capable of adapting its behaviour to its users characteristics, will be handled by using intelligent hybrid, neurofuzzy, approaches.
A crucial criterion for the success of the project developments has to do with the effectiveness and the improvement of user friendliness achieved by the proposed system when compared with the current state of Human Computer Interaction.User research and testing will be carried out by the project industrial partners and subcontractors, evaluating user acceptance and related ethical issues.
The ERMIS Consortium includes the multidisciplinarity required for tackling the project objectives. It includes big industrial IT and telecommunication partners, well known research centres and universities in the speech analysis, image analysis, psychological and computational emotion analysis fields and in intelligent multimedia systems. The Consortium expertise in the above fields will be used, on the one hand, for achieving its technological goals and developments, and on the other hand, for performing reliable market and exploitation analysis.