Abstract:
Establishing mutual gaze is one of the most
fundamental capabilities to initiate any interaction in both
human-human and human-robot communications. This
capability of mutual gaze is particularly important when
people collaborate over a shared visual space. This paper
proposes a bidirectional mutual gaze mechanism for humanrobot
communication. It is assumed that look at each other
makes the mutual gaze. However, simply looking at each
other alone does not ensure mutual gaze. Both agents also
need to be aware of being watched by the other. In order to
perform mutual gaze effectively, we propose two functions:
gaze crossing and gaze awareness. For gaze crossing, the
system detects the human face and his/her eye region. The
system also tracks the eyeball of the target human by
locating the position of eyeball. After gaze crossing, the
system detects the smile of human which ensure the gaze
awareness. Continuing the flow of communication, the robot
performs eye blinking, head nodding and verbal actions in
response to human. Several software modules are developed
to perform the bidirectional mutual gaze mechanism and
evaluate the effectiveness of each module with several
experimental trials. Moreover, the system is tested in human
initiative and robot initiative mutual gaze cases.
