EmoNets: Multimodal deep learning approaches for emotion recognition in video

TL;DR

This paper introduces EmoNets, a multimodal deep learning framework for emotion recognition in videos, combining visual, audio, and spatio-temporal features, achieving state-of-the-art results in the EmotiW challenge.

Contribution

It presents a novel multimodal deep learning approach with specialized models for each modality and effective fusion techniques, winning the 2013 EmotiW challenge.

Findings

Achieved 47.67% accuracy on the 2014 EmotiW dataset.

Multimodal fusion outperforms single-modality classifiers.

Winning submission in the 2013 EmotiW challenge.

Abstract

The task of the emotion recognition in the wild (EmotiW) Challenge is to assign one of seven emotions to short video clips extracted from Hollywood style movies. The videos depict acted-out emotions under realistic conditions with a large degree of variation in attributes such as pose and illumination, making it worthwhile to explore approaches which consider combinations of features from multiple modalities for label assignment. In this paper we present our approach to learning several specialist models using deep learning techniques, each focusing on one modality. Among these are a convolutional neural network, focusing on capturing visual information in detected faces, a deep belief net focusing on the representation of the audio stream, a K-Means based "bag-of-mouths" model, which extracts visual features around the mouth region and a relational autoencoder, which addresses spatio-temporal aspects of videos. We explore multiple methods for the combination of cues from these modalities into one common classifier. This achieves a considerably greater accuracy than predictions from our strongest single-modality classifier. Our method was the winning submission in the 2013 EmotiW challenge and achieved a test set accuracy of 47.67% on the 2014 dataset.