Assistant Professor Jian Liu and his Mobile Sensing and Intelligence Security (MOSIS) Lab have been recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for a recent paper.
Assistant Professor Jian Liu
Liu is a co-author of the paper “BioFace-3D: Continuous 3D Facial Reconstruction Through Lightweight Single-ear Biosensors,” which was published at ACM MobiCom’2021, the top-tier conference in the field of mobile computing. The paper is currently featured on the website of ACM SIGMOBILE as a “Research Highlight.” Only four to five papers are selected for this exclusive research highlight each year.
The paper proposes an advancement in facial landmark tracking and 3D reconstruction. It was authored by Liu, his doctoral students Yi Wu and Zhuohang Li, Vimal Kakaraparthi of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Tien Pham and Phuc Nguyen of the University of Texas at Arlington.
These technologies have recently gained considerable attention due to their numerous applications in human-computer interactions, facial expression analysis, and emotion recognition.
Traditional approaches require users to be confined to a particular location and face a camera under constrained recording conditions, which prevents them from being deployed in many application scenarios involving human motions.
With this new research, the authors propose the first single-earpiece lightweight biosensing system, BioFace-3D, that can unobtrusively, continuously, and reliably sense entire facial movements, track 2D facial landmarks, and further render 3D facial animations.
Prototype for the BioFace-3D single-earpiece lightweight biosensing system
Potential applications for BioFace-3D include enabling a fully immersive user experience in virtual reality (VR) scenarios; tracking facial expressions or speech-related facial movements when people wear face masks during their daily activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, long-term facial monitoring for driver fatigue detection, and student engagement evaluation in virtual learning environments.
ACM SIGMOBILE is the international professional organization for scientists, engineers, executives, educators, and students dedicated to all aspects of mobile computing and communications.
Papers of high quality and broad appeal are selected from SIGMOBILE-sponsored conferences by a committee including SIGMOBILE’s major conference representatives and elected officials. These papers will be recommended for consideration for the Communications of the ACM publication “Research Highlights” section, published in ACM GetMobile, the flagship quarterly publication of ACM SIGMOBILE (if they did not already appear), and highlighted on the SIGMOBILE website.