AAAI.2020 - Cognitive Systems

Total: 3

#1 STEP: Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Emotion Perception from Gaits [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Uttaran Bhattacharya ; Trisha Mittal ; Rohan Chandra ; Tanmay Randhavane ; Aniket Bera ; Dinesh Manocha

We present a novel classifier network called STEP, to classify perceived human emotion from gaits, based on a Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) architecture. Given an RGB video of an individual walking, our formulation implicitly exploits the gait features to classify the perceived emotion of the human into one of four emotions: happy, sad, angry, or neutral. We train STEP on annotated real-world gait videos, augmented with annotated synthetic gaits generated using a novel generative network called STEP-Gen, built on an ST-GCN based Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE). We incorporate a novel push-pull regularization loss in the CVAE formulation of STEP-Gen to generate realistic gaits and improve the classification accuracy of STEP. We also release a novel dataset (E-Gait), which consists of 4,227 human gaits annotated with perceived emotions along with thousands of synthetic gaits. In practice, STEP can learn the affective features and exhibits classification accuracy of 88% on E-Gait, which is 14–30% more accurate over prior methods.

#2 Synch-Graph: Multisensory Emotion Recognition Through Neural Synchrony via Graph Convolutional Networks [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Esma Mansouri-Benssassi ; Juan Ye

Human emotions are essentially multisensory, where emotional states are conveyed through multiple modalities such as facial expression, body language, and non-verbal and verbal signals. Therefore having multimodal or multisensory learning is crucial for recognising emotions and interpreting social signals. Existing multisensory emotion recognition approaches focus on extracting features on each modality, while ignoring the importance of constant interaction and co-learning between modalities. In this paper, we present a novel bio-inspired approach based on neural synchrony in audio-visual multisensory integration in the brain, named Synch-Graph. We model multisensory interaction using spiking neural networks (SNN) and explore the use of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) to represent and learn neural synchrony patterns. We hypothesise that modelling interactions between modalities will improve the accuracy of emotion recognition. We have evaluated Synch-Graph on two state-of-the-art datasets and achieved an overall accuracy of 98.3% and 96.82%, which are significantly higher than the existing techniques.

#3 M3ER: Multiplicative Multimodal Emotion Recognition using Facial, Textual, and Speech Cues [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi]

Authors: Trisha Mittal ; Uttaran Bhattacharya ; Rohan Chandra ; Aniket Bera ; Dinesh Manocha

We present M3ER, a learning-based method for emotion recognition from multiple input modalities. Our approach combines cues from multiple co-occurring modalities (such as face, text, and speech) and also is more robust than other methods to sensor noise in any of the individual modalities. M3ER models a novel, data-driven multiplicative fusion method to combine the modalities, which learn to emphasize the more reliable cues and suppress others on a per-sample basis. By introducing a check step which uses Canonical Correlational Analysis to differentiate between ineffective and effective modalities, M3ER is robust to sensor noise. M3ER also generates proxy features in place of the ineffectual modalities. We demonstrate the efficiency of our network through experimentation on two benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and CMU-MOSEI. We report a mean accuracy of 82.7% on IEMOCAP and 89.0% on CMU-MOSEI, which, collectively, is an improvement of about 5% over prior work.