An Application of Computer Vision Techniques to Study the Relationship between Mental Stress and Pupil Diameter among Student Population

Abstract

Stress is a state of mental tension, which helps us to cope with challenges in our life. It makes us progressive when it is positive, but excessive negative stress that perseveres for a long time leads to a state of depressiveness. Longer stressed stage of a human being changes the size, functionality and frequency of response of many internal and external body parameters. By applying computer vision techniques, these changes of body parameters can be tracked to get useful information about the mental stress for a stress affected person. Many studies show the pupil diameter varies significantly with the effect of stress. Our work is based on the study of variation of pupil diameters of stress affected and not affected university students. With the application of different supervised machine learning algorithms, we have observed that the pupil dilates more in case of stress affected students than non-stressed students. We have also found that the pupils of the students dilates more when they were in positive emotional states than their negative emotional states. This work will be helpful for researchers who are working in the field of emotion detection and recognition and affective disorder analysis.