Audio-visual based emotion recognition - a new approach

Emotion recognition is one of the latest challenges in intelligent human/computer communication. Most of the previous work on emotion recognition focused on extracting emotions from visual or audio information separately. A novel approach is presented in this paper, including both visual and audio from video clips, to recognize the human emotion. The facial animation parameters (FAPs) compliant facial feature tracking based on active appearance model is performed on the video to generate two vector stream which represent the expression feature and the visual speech one. Combined with the visual vectors, the audio vector is extracted in terms of low level features. Then, a tripled hidden Markov model is introduced to perform the recognition which allows the state asynchrony of the audio and visual observation sequences while preserving their natural correlation over time. The experimental results show that this approach outperforms only using visual or audio separately.