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Over the last decade, facial landmark tracking and 3D reconstruction have gained considerable attention due to their numerous applications, such as human-computer interactions, facial expression analysis, emotion recognition, etc. However, existing camera-based solutions require users to be confined to a particular location and face a camera at all times without occlusions, which largely limits their usage in practice. To overcome these limitations, we propose the first single-earpiece lightweight biosensing system, Bioface-3D, that can unobtrusively, continuously, and reliably sense the entire facial movements, track 2D facial landmarks, and further render 3D facial animations. Without requiring a camera positioned in front of the user, this paradigm shift from visual sensing to biosensing would introduce new opportunities in many emerging mobile and IoT applications.

Face touch is an unconscious human habit. Frequent touching of sensitive/mucosal facial zones (eyes, nose, and mouth) increases health risks by passing pathogens into the body and spreading diseases. Furthermore, accurate monitoring of face touch is critical for behavioral intervention. Existing monitoring systems only capture objects approaching the face, rather than detecting actual touches. As such, these systems are prone to false positives upon hand or object movement in proximity to one's face (e.g., picking up a phone). We present FaceSense, an ear-worn system capable of identifying actual touches and differentiating them between sensitive/mucosal areas from other facial areas. Following a multimodal approach, FaceSense integrates low-resolution thermal images and physiological signals. Thermal sensors sense the thermal infrared signal emitted by an approaching hand, while physiological sensors monitor impedance changes caused by skin deformation during a touch. Processed thermal and physiological signals are fed into a deep learning model (TouchNet) to detect touches and identify the facial zone of the touch. We fabricated prototypes using off-the-shelf hardware and conducted experiments with 14 participants while they perform various daily activities (e.g., drinking, talking). Results show a macro-F1-score of 83.4% for touch detection with leave-one-user-out cross-validation and a macro-F1-score of 90.1% for touch zone identification with a personalized model.

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