Emotion Recognition in the Wild using Deep Neural Networks and Bayesian Classifiers

Group emotion recognition in the wild is a challenging problem, due to the unstructured environments in which everyday life pictures are taken. Some of the obstacles for an effective classification are occlusions, variable lighting conditions, and image quality. In this work we present a solution based on a novel combination of deep neural networks and Bayesian classifiers. The neural network works on a bottom-up approach, analyzing emotions expressed by isolated faces. The Bayesian classifier estimates a global emotion integrating top-down features obtained through a scene descriptor. In order to validate the system we tested the framework on the dataset released for the Emotion Recognition in the Wild Challenge 2017. Our method achieved an accuracy of 64.68% on the test set, significantly outperforming the 53.62% competition baseline.Comment: accepted by the Fifth Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) Challenge 201

Deep Room Recognition Using Inaudible Echos

Recent years have seen the increasing need of location awareness by mobile applications. This paper presents a room-level indoor localization approach based on the measured room's echos in response to a two-millisecond single-tone inaudible chirp emitted by a smartphone's loudspeaker. Different from other acoustics-based room recognition systems that record full-spectrum audio for up to ten seconds, our approach records audio in a narrow inaudible band for 0.1 seconds only to preserve the user's privacy. However, the short-time and narrowband audio signal carries limited information about the room's characteristics, presenting challenges to accurate room recognition. This paper applies deep learning to effectively capture the subtle fingerprints in the rooms' acoustic responses. Our extensive experiments show that a two-layer convolutional neural network fed with the spectrogram of the inaudible echos achieve the best performance, compared with alternative designs using other raw data formats and deep models. Based on this result, we design a RoomRecognize cloud service and its mobile client library that enable the mobile application developers to readily implement the room recognition functionality without resorting to any existing infrastructures and add-on hardware. Extensive evaluation shows that RoomRecognize achieves 99.7%, 97.7%, 99%, and 89% accuracy in differentiating 22 and 50 residential/office rooms, 19 spots in a quiet museum, and 15 spots in a crowded museum, respectively. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches based on support vector machine, RoomRecognize significantly improves the Pareto frontier of recognition accuracy versus robustness against interfering sounds (e.g., ambient music).Comment: 29 page

A Survey on Emotion Recognition for Human Robot Interaction

With the recent developments of technology and the advances in artificial intelligent and machine learning techniques, it becomes possible for the robot to acquire and show the emotions as a part of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). An emotional robot can recognize the emotional states of humans so that it will be able to interact more naturally with its human counterpart in different environments. In this article, a survey on emotion recognition for HRI systems has been presented. The survey aims to achieve two objectives. Firstly, it aims to discuss the main challenges that face researchers when building emotional HRI systems. Secondly, it seeks to identify sensing channels that can be used to detect emotions and provides a literature review about recent researches published within each channel, along with the used methodologies and achieved results. Finally, some of the existing emotion recognition issues and recommendations for future works have been outlined