Predicting and improving the recognition of emotions

The technological world is moving towards more effective and friendly human computer interaction. A key factor of these emerging requirements is the ability of future systems to recognise human emotions, since emotional information is an important part of human-human communication and is therefore expected to be essential in natural and intelligent human-computer interaction. Extensive research has been done on emotion recognition using facial expressions, but all of these methods rely mainly on the results of some classifier based on the apparent expressions. However, the results of classifier may be badly affected by the noise including occlusions, inappropriate lighting conditions, sudden movement of head and body, talking, and other possible problems. In this paper, we propose a system using exponential moving averages and Markov chain to improve the classifier results and somewhat predict the future emotions by taking into account the current as well as previous emotions

Emotion Recognition from EEG Signal Focusing on Deep Learning and Shallow Learning Techniques

Recently, electroencephalogram-based emotion recognition has become crucial in enabling the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) system to become more intelligent. Due to the outstanding applications of emotion recognition, e.g., person-based decision making, mind-machine interfacing, cognitive interaction, affect detection, feeling detection, etc., emotion recognition has become successful in attracting the recent hype of AI-empowered research. Therefore, numerous studies have been conducted driven by a range of approaches, which demand a systematic review of methodologies used for this task with their feature sets and techniques. It will facilitate the beginners as guidance towards composing an effective emotion recognition system. In this article, we have conducted a rigorous review on the state-of-the-art emotion recognition systems, published in recent literature, and summarized some of the common emotion recognition steps with relevant definitions, theories, and analyses to provide key knowledge to develop a proper framework. Moreover, studies included here were dichotomized based on two categories: i) deep learning-based, and ii) shallow machine learning-based emotion recognition systems. The reviewed systems were compared based on methods, classifier, the number of classified emotions, accuracy, and dataset used. An informative comparison, recent research trends, and some recommendations are also provided for future research directions

Time-Efficient Hybrid Approach for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression recognition is an emerging research area for improving human and computer interaction. This research plays a significant role in the field of social communication, commercial enterprise, law enforcement, and other computer interactions. In this paper, we propose a time-efficient hybrid design for facial expression recognition, combining image pre-processing steps and different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) structures providing better accuracy and greatly improved training time. We are predicting seven basic emotions of human faces: sadness, happiness, disgust, anger, fear, surprise and neutral. The model performs well regarding challenging facial expression recognition where the emotion expressed could be one of several due to their quite similar facial characteristics such as anger, disgust, and sadness. The experiment to test the model was conducted across multiple databases and different facial orientations, and to the best of our knowledge, the model provided an accuracy of about 89.58% for KDEF dataset, 100% accuracy for JAFFE dataset and 71.975% accuracy for combined (KDEF + JAFFE + SFEW) dataset across these different scenarios. Performance evaluation was done by cross-validation techniques to avoid bias towards a specific set of images from a database

Contrastive Regularization for Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using Audio and Text

Speech emotion recognition is a challenge and an important step towards more natural human-computer interaction (HCI). The popular approach is multimodal emotion recognition based on model-level fusion, which means that the multimodal signals can be encoded to acquire embeddings, and then the embeddings are concatenated together for the final classification. However, due to the influence of noise or other factors, each modality does not always tend to the same emotional category, which affects the generalization of a model. In this paper, we propose a novel regularization method via contrastive learning for multimodal emotion recognition using audio and text. By introducing a discriminator to distinguish the difference between the same and different emotional pairs, we explicitly restrict the latent code of each modality to contain the same emotional information, so as to reduce the noise interference and get more discriminative representation. Experiments are performed on the standard IEMOCAP dataset for 4-class emotion recognition. The results show a significant improvement of 1.44\% and 1.53\% in terms of weighted accuracy (WA) and unweighted accuracy (UA) compared to the baseline system.Comment: Completed in October 2020 and submitted to ICASSP202

Speech emotion recognition with artificial intelligence for contact tracing in the COVID‐19 pandemic

If understanding sentiments is already a difficult task in human‐human communication, this becomes extremely challenging when a human‐computer interaction happens, as for instance in chatbot conversations. In this work, a machine learning neural network‐based Speech Emotion Recognition system is presented to perform emotion detection in a chatbot virtual assistant whose task was to perform contact tracing during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The system was tested on a novel dataset of audio samples, provided by the company Blu Pantheon, which developed virtual agents capable of autonomously performing contacts tracing for individuals positive to COVID‐19. The dataset provided was unlabelled for the emotions associated to the conversations. Therefore, the work was structured using a sort of transfer learning strategy. First, the model is trained using the labelled and publicly available Italian‐language dataset EMOVO Corpus. The accuracy achieved in testing phase reached 92%. To the best of their knowledge, thiswork represents the first example in the context of chatbot speech emotion recognition for contact tracing, shedding lights towards the importance of the use of such techniques in virtual assistants and chatbot conversational contexts for psychological human status assessment. The code of this work was publicly released at: https://github.com/fp1acm8/SE

Spatio-Temporal Image-Based Encoded Atlases for EEG Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition plays an essential role in human-human interaction since it is a key to understanding the emotional states and reactions of human beings when they are subject to events and engagements in everyday life. Moving towards human-computer interaction, the study of emotions becomes fundamental because it is at the basis of the design of advanced systems to support a broad spectrum of application areas, including forensic, rehabilitative, educational, and many others. An effective method for discriminating emotions is based on ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) data analysis, which is used as input for classification systems. Collecting brain signals on several channels and for a wide range of emotions produces cumbersome datasets that are hard to manage, transmit, and use in varied applications. In this context, the paper introduces the Empátheia system, which explores a different EEG representation by encoding EEG signals into images prior to their classification. In particular, the proposed system extracts spatio-temporal image encodings, or atlases, from EEG data through the Processing and transfeR of Interaction States and Mappings through Image-based eNcoding (PRISMIN) framework, thus obtaining a compact representation of the input signals. The atlases are then classified through the Empátheia architecture, which comprises branches based on convolutional, recurrent, and transformer models designed and tuned to capture the spatial and temporal aspects of emotions. Extensive experiments were conducted on the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) Emotion EEG Dataset (SEED) public dataset, where the proposed system significantly reduced its size while retaining high performance. The results obtained highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach and suggest new avenues for data representation in emotion recognition from EEG signals

Affective Medicine: a review of Affective Computing efforts in Medical Informatics

Background: Affective computing (AC) is concerned with emotional interactions performed with and through computers. It is defined as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions”. AC enables investigation and understanding of the relation between human emotions and health as well as application of assistive and useful technologies in the medical domain. Objectives: 1) To review the general state of the art in AC and its applications in medicine, and 2) to establish synergies between the research communities of AC and medical informatics. Methods: Aspects related to the human affective state as a determinant of the human health are discussed, coupled with an illustration of significant AC research and related literature output. Moreover, affective communication channels are described and their range of application fields is explored through illustrative examples. Results: The presented conferences, European research projects and research publications illustrate the recent increase of interest in the AC area by the medical community. Tele-home healthcare, AmI, ubiquitous monitoring, e-learning and virtual communities with emotionally expressive characters for elderly or impaired people are few areas where the potential of AC has been realized and applications have emerged. Conclusions: A number of gaps can potentially be overcome through the synergy of AC and medical informatics. The application of AC technologies parallels the advancement of the existing state of the art and the introduction of new methods. The amount of work and projects reviewed in this paper witness an ambitious and optimistic synergetic future of the affective medicine field

The perception of emotion in artificial agents

Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges and guiding principles to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents