Study on facial emotional expression induced by the annoying noise

Abstract

Noise is annoying. Facial expressions indicate diverse emotions instantly, objectively and accurately. In this paper, the facial emotional expression is used to assess the noise annoyance to nullify the disadvantages of traditional evaluation methods. Firstly, by exploiting listening experiments, the facial videos, physiological signals and individual annoyance from 30 listeners with different nationalities were collected. Then, the facial action units (AUs) were extracted, identified and analyzed, and the AUs combination reflects annoyed emotion induced by the noise was confirmed. Furthermore, a novel evaluation scale embodying color and emotional symbols was proposed, which has been proven to be valid by the social surveys. The present study confirms that it is feasible to evaluate the noise annoyance more objectively by exploring the listener's facial "annoyance" expression. The innovative scale can avoid the understanding bias and improve the evaluation efficiency remarkably.