Affective Computing

This book provides an overview of state of the art research in Affective Computing. It presents new ideas, original results and practical experiences in this increasingly important research field. The book consists of 23 chapters categorized into four sections. Since one of the most important means of human communication is facial expression, the first section of this book (Chapters 1 to 7) presents a research on synthesis and recognition of facial expressions. Given that we not only use the face but also body movements to express ourselves, in the second section (Chapters 8 to 11) we present a research on perception and generation of emotional expressions by using full-body motions. The third section of the book (Chapters 12 to 16) presents computational models on emotion, as well as findings from neuroscience research. In the last section of the book (Chapters 17 to 22) we present applications related to affective computing

Four not six: revealing culturally common facial expressions of emotion

As a highly social species, humans generate complex facial expressions to communicate a diverse range of emotions. Since Darwin’s work, identifying amongst these complex patterns which are common across cultures and which are culture-specific has remained a central question in psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and more recently machine vision and social robotics. Classic approaches to addressing this question typically tested the cross-cultural recognition of theoretically motivated facial expressions representing six emotions, and reported universality. Yet, variable recognition accuracy across cultures suggests a narrower cross-cultural communication, supported by sets of simpler expressive patterns embedded in more complex facial expressions. We explore this hypothesis by modelling the facial expressions of over 60 emotions across two cultures, and segregating out the latent expressive patterns. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, we first map the conceptual organization of a broad spectrum of emotion words by building semantic networks in two cultures. For each emotion word in each culture, we then model and validate its corresponding dynamic facial expression, producing over 60 culturally valid facial expression models. We then apply to the pooled models a multivariate data reduction technique, revealing four latent and culturally common facial expression patterns that each communicates specific combinations of valence, arousal and dominance. We then reveal the face movements that accentuate each latent expressive pattern to create complex facial expressions. Our data questions the widely held view that six facial expression patterns are universal, instead suggesting four latent expressive patterns with direct implications for emotion communication, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and social robotics

DAISEE: Dataset for Affective States in E-Learning Environments

Extracting and understanding a ective states of subjects through analysis of face videos is of high consequence to advance the levels of interaction in human-computer interfaces. This paper aims to highlight vision-related tasks focused on understanding \reactions" of subjects to presented content which has not been largely studied by the vision community in comparison to other emotions. To facilitate future study in this eld, we present an e ort in collecting DAiSEE, a free to use large-scale dataset using crowd annotation, that not only simulates a real world setting for e-learning environments, but also captures the interpretability issues of such a ective states by human annotators. In addition to the dataset, we present benchmark results based on stan- dard baseline methods and vote aggregation strategies, thus providing a springboard for further research

Deep Multi-Model Fusion for Human Activity Recognition Using Evolutionary Algorithms

Machine recognition of the human activities is an active research area in computer vision. In previous study, either one or two types of modalities have been used to handle this task. However, the grouping of maximum information improves the recognition accuracy of human activities. Therefore, this paper proposes an automatic human activity recognition system through deep fusion of multi-streams along with decision-level score optimization using evolutionary algorithms on RGB, depth maps and 3d skeleton joint information. Our proposed approach works in three phases, 1) space-time activity learning using two 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN) and a Long Sort Term Memory (LSTM) network from RGB, Depth and skeleton joint positions 2) Training of SVM using the activities learned from previous phase for each model and score generation using trained SVM 3) Score fusion and optimization using two Evolutionary algorithm such as Genetic algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The proposed approach is validated on two 3D challenging datasets, MSRDailyActivity3D and UTKinectAction3D. Experiments on these two datasets achieved 85.94% and 96.5% accuracies, respectively. The experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed representation. Furthermore, the fusion of different modalities improves recognition accuracies rather than using one or two types of information and obtains the state-of-art results

Adaptive 3D facial action intensity estimation and emotion recognition

Automatic recognition of facial emotion has been widely studied for various computer vision tasks (e.g. health monitoring, driver state surveillance and personalized learning). Most existing facial emotion recognition systems, however, either have not fully considered subject-independent dynamic features or were limited to 2D models, thus are not robust enough for real-life recognition tasks with subject variation, head movement and illumination change. Moreover, there is also lack of systematic research on effective newly arrived novel emotion class detection. To address these challenges, we present a real-time 3D facial Action Unit (AU) intensity estimation and emotion recognition system. It automatically selects 16 motion-based facial feature sets using minimal-redundancy–maximal-relevance criterion based optimization and estimates the intensities of 16 diagnostic AUs using feedforward Neural Networks and Support Vector Regressors. We also propose a set of six novel adaptive ensemble classifiers for robust classification of the six basic emotions and the detection of newly arrived unseen novel emotion classes (emotions that are not included in the training set). A distance-based clustering and uncertainty measures of the base classifiers within each ensemble model are used to inform the novel class detection. Evaluated with the Bosphorus 3D database, the system has achieved the best performance of 0.071 overall Mean Squared Error (MSE) for AU intensity estimation using Support Vector Regressors, and 92.2% average accuracy for the recognition of the six basic emotions using the proposed ensemble classifiers. In comparison with other related work, our research outperforms other state-of-the-art research on 3D facial emotion recognition for the Bosphorus database. Moreover, in on-line real-time evaluation with real human subjects, the proposed system also shows superior real-time performance with 84% recognition accuracy and great flexibility and adaptation for newly arrived novel (e.g. ‘contempt’ which is not included in the six basic emotions) emotion detection

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion