A preliminary work on dog emotion recognition

Humans react to animal emotions, and animals react to human emotions because we share similar emotional and neurological mirroring systems. Mirror neurons fire both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another individual. This neurological system has been linked to social behaviors and abilities, from empathy to learning by imitation, both in intra-species and in inter-species communications. The aim of this paper is to study if a machine learning system can recognize animal emotions, starting from dogs' basic emotions of joy and anger, and to investigate the opportunity of future applications concerning systems of prosthetic knowledge to help people without the proper experience or capability to understand animals aggressivity or friendliness, or for supportive systems in Artificial Intelligence.