Multimodal information fusion of audiovisual emotion recognition using novel information theoretic tools

This paper aims at providing general theoretical analysis for the issue of multimodal information fusion and implementing novel information theoretic tools in multimedia application. The most essential issues for information fusion include feature transformation and reduction of feature dimensionality. Most previous solutions are based on the second order statistics, which is only optimal for Gaussian-like distribution, while in this paper we describe kernel entropy component analysis (KECA) which utilizes descriptor of information entropy and achieves improved performance by entropy estimation. We present a new solution based on the integration of information fusion theory and information theoretic tools in this paper. The proposed method has been applied to audiovisual emotion recognition. Information fusion has been implemented for audio and video channels at feature level and decision level. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves improved performance in comparison with the existing methods, especially when the dimension of feature space is substantially reduced.