Emerging application areas and challenges of automatic face analysis

In the future world of ubiquitous computing, various computing devices will be thoroughly and invisibly embedded into different environments of our daily living. These smart machines will not only actively perceive and respond to human presence and behaviour, but also support friendly intelligent interaction with a user-interaction that resembles mechanisms of human-human communication. This vision of the future and the fact that the face is one of the most important means of human natural communication have motivated the idea of exploiting automatic face analysis in the settings of ubiquitous interaction. In this paper, we review several emerging application areas of automatic face analysis in different interactive spaces, including urban environments. We discuss challenges and differences in applying automatic face analysis in indoor and outdoor spaces, as well as issues that arise from privacy protection concerns and public's social acceptability of this new technology.