Cognitive emotions in e-learning processes and their potential relationship with students’ academic adjustment

In times of growing importance and emphasis on improving academic outcomes for young people, their academic selves/lives are increasingly becoming more central to their understanding of their own wellbeing. How they experience and perceive their academic successes or failures, can influence their perceived self-efficacy and eventual academic achievement. To this end, ‘cognitive emotions’, elicited to acquire or develop new skills/knowledges, can play a crucial role as they indicate the state or the “flow” of a student’s emotions, when facing challenging tasks. Within innovative teaching models, measuring the affective components of learning have been mainly based on self-reports and scales which have neglected the real-time detection of emotions, through for example, recording or measuring facial expressions. The aim of the present study is to test the reliability of an ad hoc software trained to detect and classify cognitive emotions from facial expressions across two different environments, namely a video-lecture and a chat with teacher, and to explore cognitive emotions in relation to academic e-selfefficacy and academic adjustment. To pursue these goals, we used video-recordings of ten psychology students from an online university engaging in online learning tasks, and employed software to automatically detect eleven cognitive emotions. Preliminary results support and extend prior studies, illustrating how exploring cognitive emotions in real time can inform the development and success of academic e-learning interventions aimed at monitoring and promoting students’ wellbeing.peer-reviewe

Combining local descriptors and classification methods for human emotion recognition.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Human Emotion Recognition occupies a very important place in artificial intelligence and has several applications, such as emotionally intelligent robots, driver fatigue monitoring, mood prediction, and many others. Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems can recognize human emotions by extracting face image features and classifying them as one of several prototypic emotions. Local descriptors are good at encoding micro-patterns and capturing their distribution in a sub-region of an image. Moreover, dividing the face into sub-regions introduces information about micro-pattern locations, essential for developing robust facial expression features. Hence, local descriptors’ efficiencies depend heavily on parameters such as the sub-region size and histogram length. However, the extraction parameters are seldom optimized in existing approaches. This dissertation reviews several local descriptors and classifiers, and experiments are conducted to improve the robustness and accuracy of existing FER methods. A study of the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) descriptor inspires this research to propose a new face registration algorithm. The approach uses contrast-limited histogram equalization to enhance the image, followed by binary thresholding and blob detection operations to rotate the face upright. Additionally, this research proposes a new method for optimized FER. The main idea behind the approach is to optimize the calculation of feature vectors by varying the extraction parameter values, producing several feature sets. The best extraction parameter values are selected by evaluating the classification performances of each feature set. The proposed approach is also implemented using different combinations of local descriptors and classification methods under the same experimental conditions. The results reveal that the proposed methods produced a better performance than what was reported in previous studies. Furthermore, the results showed an improvement of up to 2% compared with the performance achieved in previous works. The results showed that HOG was the most effective local descriptor, while Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) were the best classifiers. Hence, the best combinations were HOG+SVM and HOG+MLP

Emotion and Stress Recognition Related Sensors and Machine Learning Technologies

This book includes impactful chapters which present scientific concepts, frameworks, architectures and ideas on sensing technologies and machine learning techniques. These are relevant in tackling the following challenges: (i) the field readiness and use of intrusive sensor systems and devices for capturing biosignals, including EEG sensor systems, ECG sensor systems and electrodermal activity sensor systems; (ii) the quality assessment and management of sensor data; (iii) data preprocessing, noise filtering and calibration concepts for biosignals; (iv) the field readiness and use of nonintrusive sensor technologies, including visual sensors, acoustic sensors, vibration sensors and piezoelectric sensors; (v) emotion recognition using mobile phones and smartwatches; (vi) body area sensor networks for emotion and stress studies; (vii) the use of experimental datasets in emotion recognition, including dataset generation principles and concepts, quality insurance and emotion elicitation material and concepts; (viii) machine learning techniques for robust emotion recognition, including graphical models, neural network methods, deep learning methods, statistical learning and multivariate empirical mode decomposition; (ix) subject-independent emotion and stress recognition concepts and systems, including facial expression-based systems, speech-based systems, EEG-based systems, ECG-based systems, electrodermal activity-based systems, multimodal recognition systems and sensor fusion concepts and (x) emotion and stress estimation and forecasting from a nonlinear dynamical system perspective

Emotion Recognition for Affective Computing: Computer Vision and Machine Learning Approach

The purpose of affective computing is to develop reliable and intelligent models that computers can use to interact more naturally with humans. The critical requirements for such models are that they enable computers to recognise, understand and interpret the emotional states expressed by humans. The emotion recognition has been a research topic of interest for decades, not only in relation to developments in the affective computing field but also due to its other potential applications. A particularly challenging problem that has emerged from this body of work, however, is the task of recognising facial expressions and emotions from still images or videos in real-time. This thesis aimed to solve this challenging problem by developing new techniques involving computer vision, machine learning and different levels of information fusion. Firstly, an efficient and effective algorithm was developed to improve the performance of the Viola-Jones algorithm. The proposed method achieved significantly higher detection accuracy (95%) than the standard Viola-Jones method (90%) in face detection from thermal images, while also doubling the detection speed. Secondly, an automatic subsystem for detecting eyeglasses, Shallow-GlassNet, was proposed to address the facial occlusion problem by designing a shallow convolutional neural network capable of detecting eyeglasses rapidly and accurately. Thirdly, a novel neural network model for decision fusion was proposed in order to make use of multiple classifier systems, which can increase the classification accuracy by up to 10%. Finally, a high-speed approach to emotion recognition from videos, called One-Shot Only (OSO), was developed based on a novel spatio-temporal data fusion method for representing video frames. The OSO method tackled video classification as a single image classification problem, which not only made it extremely fast but also reduced the overfitting problem

Beyond Traditional Emotion Recognition

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH