Semantic Audio-Visual Data Fusion for Automatic Emotion Recognition

The paper describes a novel technique for the recognition of emotions from multimodal data. We focus on the recognition of the six prototypic emotions. The results from the facial expression recognition and from the emotion recognition from speech are combined using a bi-modal multimodal semantic data fusion model that determines the most probable emotion of the subject. Two types of models based on geometric face features for facial expression recognition are being used, depending on the presence or absence of speech. In our approach we define an algorithm that is robust to changes of face shape that occur during regular speech. The influence of phoneme generation on the face shape during speech is removed by using features that are only related to the eyes and the eyebrows. The paper includes results from testing the presented models.