A research team at The University of Amsterdam and at NEMO in Amsterdam is collecting smiles — or at least moving images of smiles. Their database currently has about 400 smiles. They present this official description:
UvA-NEMO Smile Database is a large-scale smile database which has 1240 smile videos (597 spontaneous and 643 posed) from 400 subjects. Ages of subjects vary from 8 to 76 years. Videos are in RGB color and recorded with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels at a rate of 50 frames per second under controlled illumination conditions. For further illumination and color normalization, a color chart is present on the background of the videos.
The data have contributed to at least one study:
“Are You Really Smiling at Me? Spontaneous versus Posed Enjoyment Smiles,” H. Dibeklioglu, A.A. Salah, Th. Gevers, Proc. European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Firenze, 2012.
(Thanks to investigator Diana Issidorides for bringing this to our attention.)