FABO: The Bimodal Face and Body Gesture Database for Automatic Analysis of Human Nonverbal Affective Behavior

Databases containing representative samples of human multi-modal expressive behavior are needed for the development of affect recognition systems. As an integral part of our research on multimodal emotion recognition, we created a novel bimodal face and body gesture database suitable for use in automatic vision-based analysis of human nonverbal communicative behavior. 

The Bimodal Face and Body Gesture Database (FABO) for Automatic Analysis of Human Nonverbal Affective Behavior was created at the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) by Hatice Gunes and Massimo Piccardi in 2005. Posed visual data was collected from volunteers in a laboratory setting by asking and directing the participants on the required actions and movements. The FABO database contains videos of face and body expressions recorded by the face and body cameras, simultaneously, as shown in the figures below. This database is the first to date to combine facial and body displays in a truly bimodal manner, hence enabling significant future progresses in affective computing research. The details of FABO can found in the following paper:

H. Gunes and M. Piccardi, “A Bimodal Face and Body Gesture Database for Automatic Analysis of Human Nonverbal Affective Behavior”, Proc. of ICPR 2006 the 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 20-24 Aug. 2006, Hong Kong, China.

To advance state-of-the-art in multi-modal affect recognition the FABO Database will be made available to researchers in affective computing field on a case by case basis only. All requests for the FABO Database must be submitted in writing to Hatice Gunes (haticeg@it.uts.edu.au) and Massimo Piccardi (massimo@it.uts.edu.au). Prior to obtaining the database the researchers are required to sign The FABO Database Release Agreement.