Emotional expressions are the behaviors that communicate our emotional state or attitude to others. They are expressed through verbal and non-verbal communication. Complex human behavior can be understood by studying physical features from multiple modalities; mainly facial, vocal and physical gestures. Recently, spontaneous multi-modal emotion recognition has been extensively studied for human behavior analysis. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based approach for audio-visual emotion recognition. Our approach leverages recent advances in deep learning like knowledge distillation and high-performing deep architectures. The deep feature representations of the audio and visual modalities are fused based on a model-level fusion strategy. A recurrent neural network is then used to capture the temporal dynamics. Our proposed approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in predicting valence on the RECOLA dataset. Moreover, our proposed visual facial expression feature extraction network outperforms state-of-the-art results on the AffectNet and Google Facial Expression Comparison datasets.
It has been suggested in developmental psychology literature that the communication of affect between mothers and their infants correlates with the socioemotional and cognitive development of infants. In this study, we obtained day-long audio recordings of 10 mother-infant pairs in order to study their affect communication in speech with a focus on mother's speech. In order to build a model for speech emotion detection, we used the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS) and trained a Convolutional Neural Nets model which is able to classify 6 different emotions at…
Versatile audio-visual learning for emotion recognition
Multimodal Signal Processing (MSP) Lab（多模态信号处理实验室）；Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science（埃里克·乔纳森工程与计算机科学学院）；The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）
In this paper, we introduce a pretrained audio-visual Transformer trained on more than 500k utterances from nearly 4000 celebrities from the VoxCeleb2 dataset for human behavior understanding. The model aims to capture and extract useful information from the interactions between human facial and auditory behaviors, with application in emotion recognition. We evaluate the model performance on two datasets, namely CREMAD-D (emotion classification) and MSP-IMPROV (continuous emotion regression). Experimental results show that fine-tuning the pre-trained model helps improving emotion classificatio…
This paper focuses on two key problems for audio-visual emotion recognition in the video. One is the audio and visual streams temporal alignment for feature level fusion. The other one is locating and re-weighting the perception attentions in the whole audio-visual stream for better recognition. The Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) is employed as the main classification architecture. Firstly, soft attention mechanism aligns the audio and visual streams. Secondly, seven emotion embedding vectors, which are corresponding to each classification emotion type, are added to…
Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）
In this paper, we consider the problem of multimodal data analysis with a use case of audiovisual emotion recognition. We propose an architecture capable of learning from raw data and describe three variants of it with distinct modality fusion mechanisms. While most of the previous works consider the ideal scenario of presence of both modalities at all times during inference, we evaluate the robustness of the model in the unconstrained settings where one modality is absent or noisy, and propose a method to mitigate these limitations in a form of modality dropout. Most importantly, we find that…
We present a learning-based method for detecting real and fake deepfake multimedia content. To maximize information for learning, we extract and analyze the similarity between the two audio and visual modalities from within the same video. Additionally, we extract and compare affective cues corresponding to perceived emotion from the two modalities within a video to infer whether the input video is "real" or "fake". We propose a deep learning network, inspired by the Siamese network architecture and the triplet loss. To validate our model, we report the AUC metric on two large-scale deepfake d…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Multimodal emotion recognition is a challenging task in emotion computing as it is quite difficult to extract discriminative features to identify the subtle differences in human emotions with abstract concept and multiple expressions. Moreover, how to fully utilize both audio and visual information is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal fusion attention network for audio-visual emotion recognition based on adaptive and multi-level factorized bilinear pooling (FBP). First, for the audio stream, a fully convolutional network (FCN) equipped with 1-D attention mecha…
Self-supervised learning has attracted plenty of recent research interest. However, most works for self-supervision in speech are typically unimodal and there has been limited work that studies the interaction between audio and visual modalities for cross-modal self-supervision. This work (1) investigates visual self-supervision via face reconstruction to guide the learning of audio representations; (2) proposes an audio-only self-supervision approach for speech representation learning; (3) shows that a multi-task combination of the proposed visual and audio self-supervision is beneficial for …
Deep learning models trained on audio-visual data have been successfully used to achieve state-of-the-art performance for emotion recognition. In particular, models trained with multitask learning have shown additional performance improvements. However, such multitask models entangle information between the tasks, encoding the mutual dependencies present in label distributions in the real world data used for training. This work explores the disentanglement of multimodal signal representations for the primary task of emotion recognition and a secondary person identification task. In particular,…
In this paper we explore audiovisual emotion recognition under noisy acoustic conditions with a focus on speech features. We attempt to answer the following research questions: (i) How does speech emotion recognition perform on noisy data? and (ii) To what extend does a multimodal approach improve the accuracy and compensate for potential performance degradation at different noise levels? We present an analytical investigation on two emotion datasets with superimposed noise at different signal-to-noise ratios, comparing three types of acoustic features. Visual features are incorporated with a …
READ-Net: Clarifying Emotional Ambiguity via Adaptive Feature Recalibration for Audio-Visual Depression Detection
College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东）计算机科学与技术学院）；College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机科学学院）；School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学计算科学学院）
Key challenges in developing generalized automatic emotion recognition systems include scarcity of labeled data and lack of gold-standard references. Even for the cues that are labeled as the same emotion category, the variability of associated expressions can be high depending on the elicitation context e.g., emotion elicited during improvised conversations vs. acted sessions with predefined scripts. In this work, we regard the emotion elicitation approach as domain knowledge, and explore domain transfer learning techniques on emotional utterances collected under different emotion elicitation…
MoEE: Mixture of Emotion Experts for Audio-Driven Portrait Animation
Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；Li Auto（理想汽车）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学杭州高等研究院）
Audio-Video Emotion Recognition is now attacked with Deep Neural Network modeling tools. In published papers, as a rule, the authors show only cases of the superiority in multi-modality over audio-only or video-only modality. However, there are cases superiority in uni-modality can be found. In our research, we hypothesize that for fuzzy categories of emotional events, the within-modal and inter-modal noisy information represented indirectly in the parameters of the modeling neural network impedes better performance in the existing late fusion and end-to-end multi-modal network training strate…
HiCMAE: Hierarchical Contrastive Masked Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
AV-EMO-Reasoning: Benchmarking Emotional Reasoning Capabilities in Omni-modal LLMS with Audio-visual Cues
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；University of Southern California（美国南加州大学）
Didi Chuxing（滴滴出行）；Nankai University（南开大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Weihai（哈尔滨工业大学（威海））
Emotion recognition in user-generated videos plays an important role in human-centered computing. Existing methods mainly employ traditional two-stage shallow pipeline, i.e. extracting visual and/or audio features and training classifiers. In this paper, we propose to recognize video emotions in an end-to-end manner based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we develop a deep Visual-Audio Attention Network (VAANet), a novel architecture that integrates spatial, channel-wise, and temporal attentions into a visual 3D CNN and temporal attentions into an audio 2D CNN. Further, we…
École de Technologie Supérieure, University of Québec（魁北克大学高等技术学院）
This paper presents a novel deep neural network (DNN) for multimodal fusion of audio, video and text modalities for emotion recognition. The proposed DNN architecture has independent and shared layers which aim to learn the representation for each modality, as well as the best combined representation to achieve the best prediction. Experimental results on the AVEC Sentiment Analysis in the Wild dataset indicate that the proposed DNN can achieve a higher level of Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) than other state-of-the-art systems that perform early fusion of modalities at feature-leve…
University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学）；Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学信息学与系统中心）
We present ESSYS* Sharing #UC, an audiovisual installation artwork that reflects upon the emotional context related to the university and the city of Coimbra, based on the data shared about them on Twitter. The installation was presented in an urban art gallery of Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra during the summer and autumn of 2021. In the installation space, one may see a collection of typographic posters displaying the tweets and listening to an ever-changing ambient sound. The present audiovisuals are created by an autonomous computational creative approach, which employs a neural cla…
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Innopeak Technology Inc.（Innopeak科技公司）；Sigma Technologies（12西格玛科技公司）；JD.com, Inc.（京东集团）；University of Washington Bothell（华盛顿大学博塞尔分校）
Emotion recognition plays an important role in human-computer interaction (HCI) and has been extensively studied for decades. Although tremendous improvements have been achieved for posed expressions, recognizing human emotions in "close-to-real-world" environments remains a challenge. In this paper, we proposed two strategies to fuse information extracted from different modalities, i.e., audio and visual. Specifically, we utilized LBP-TOP, an ensemble of CNNs, and a bi-directional LSTM (BLSTM) to extract features from the visual channel, and the OpenSmile toolkit to extract features from the …
eMotions: A Large-Scale Dataset and Audio-Visual Fusion Network for Emotion Analysis in Short-form Videos
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University（计算机科学与技术学院，西安交通大学）；College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University & ByteDance（智能机器人与先进制造学院，复旦大学 & 字节跳动）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Zhengzhou University（网络科学与工程学院，郑州大学）；Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（先进技术研究院，中国科学技术大学）；Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co., Ltd（Inspur电子信息产业有限公司）；Department of Computer Science, The University of Toronto（计算机科学系，多伦多大学）；Research Center for Space Computing System, Zhejiang Lab（空间计算系统研究中心，浙江实验室）；Institute of Information Technology, University of Klagenfurt（信息技术学院，克雷格福特大学）；School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University（计算机科学与信息学院，卡迪夫大学）
Humans are able to comprehend information from multiple domains for e.g. speech, text and visual. With advancement of deep learning technology there has been significant improvement of speech recognition. Recognizing emotion from speech is important aspect and with deep learning technology emotion recognition has improved in accuracy and latency. There are still many challenges to improve accuracy. In this work, we attempt to explore different neural networks to improve accuracy of emotion recognition. With different architectures explored, we find (CNN+RNN) + 3DCNN multi-model architecture wh…
Enriching Multimodal Sentiment Analysis through Textual Emotional Descriptions of Visual-Audio Content
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ)（广东人工智能与数字经济实验室（深圳））；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；Fotonation Romania, member of Xperi Group（Fotonation罗马尼亚公司（Xperi集团成员））
Emotion recognition has become an important field of research in the human-computer interactions domain. The latest advancements in the field show that combining visual with audio information lead to better results if compared to the case of using a single source of information separately. From a visual point of view, a human emotion can be recognized by analyzing the facial expression of the person. More precisely, the human emotion can be described through a combination of several Facial Action Units. In this paper, we propose a system that is able to recognize emotions with a high accuracy …
We present READ Avatars, a 3D-based approach for generating 2D avatars that are driven by audio input with direct and granular control over the emotion. Previous methods are unable to achieve realistic animation due to the many-to-many nature of audio to expression mappings. We alleviate this issue by introducing an adversarial loss in the audio-to-expression generation process. This removes the smoothing effect of regression-based models and helps to improve the realism and expressiveness of the generated avatars. We note furthermore, that audio should be directly utilized when generating mou…
Visual emotion expression plays an important role in audiovisual speech communication. In this work, we propose a novel approach to rendering visual emotion expression in speech-driven talking face generation. Specifically, we design an end-to-end talking face generation system that takes a speech utterance, a single face image, and a categorical emotion label as input to render a talking face video synchronized with the speech and expressing the conditioned emotion. Objective evaluation on image quality, audiovisual synchronization, and visual emotion expression shows that the proposed system…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
The audio-video based emotion recognition aims to classify a given video into basic emotions. In this paper, we describe our approaches in EmotiW 2019, which mainly explores emotion features and feature fusion strategies for audio and visual modality. For emotion features, we explore audio feature with both speech-spectrogram and Log Mel-spectrogram and evaluate several facial features with different CNN models and different emotion pretrained strategies. For fusion strategies, we explore intra-modal and cross-modal fusion methods, such as designing attention mechanisms to highlights important…
EmoGene: Audio-Driven Emotional 3D Talking-Head Generation
Khoury College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, USA（东北大学Khoury计算机科学学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, USA（东北大学电气与计算机工程系）
Nanjing University（南京大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Although significant progress has been made to audio-driven talking face generation, existing methods either neglect facial emotion or cannot be applied to arbitrary subjects. In this paper, we propose the Emotion-Aware Motion Model (EAMM) to generate one-shot emotional talking faces by involving an emotion source video. Specifically, we first propose an Audio2Facial-Dynamics module, which renders talking faces from audio-driven unsupervised zero- and first-order key-points motion. Then through exploring the motion model's properties, we further propose an Implicit Emotion Displacement Learner…
This paper describes audEERING's submissions as well as additional evaluations for the One-Minute-Gradual (OMG) emotion recognition challenge. We provide the results for audio and video processing on subject (in)dependent evaluations. On the provided Development set, we achieved 0.343 Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) for arousal (from audio) and .401 for valence (from video).
School of Electronics Engineering, Kyungpook National University（庆北国立大学电子工程学院）
Generating music with emotion similar to that of an input video is a very relevant issue nowadays. Video content creators and automatic movie directors benefit from maintaining their viewers engaged, which can be facilitated by producing novel material eliciting stronger emotions in them. Moreover, there's currently a demand for more empathetic computers to aid humans in applications such as augmenting the perception ability of visually and/or hearing impaired people. Current approaches overlook the video's emotional characteristics in the music generation step, only consider static images ins…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Automatic emotion recognition (AER) is a challenging task due to the abstract concept and multiple expressions of emotion. Although there is no consensus on a definition, human emotional states usually can be apperceived by auditory and visual systems. Inspired by this cognitive process in human beings, it's natural to simultaneously utilize audio and visual information in AER. However, most traditional fusion approaches only build a linear paradigm, such as feature concatenation and multi-system fusion, which hardly captures complex association between audio and video. In this paper, we intro…
Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is crucial in developing sympathetic human-machine interaction. In conversational videos, emotion can be present in multiple modalities, i.e., audio, video, and transcript. However, due to the inherent characteristics of these modalities, multi-modal ERC has always been considered a challenging undertaking. Existing ERC research focuses mainly on using text information in a discussion, ignoring the other two modalities. We anticipate that emotion recognition accuracy can be improved by employing a multi-modal approach. Thus, in this study, we propose …
We propose MoodNet - A Deep Convolutional Neural Network based architecture to effectively predict the emotion associated with a piece of music given its audio and lyrical content.We evaluate different architectures consisting of varying number of two-dimensional convolutional and subsampling layers,followed by dense layers.We use Mel-Spectrograms to represent the audio content and word embeddings-specifically 100 dimensional word vectors, to represent the textual content represented by the lyrics.We feed input data from both modalities to our MoodNet architecture.The output from both the moda…
GaussianEmoTalker: Real-Time Emotional Talking Head Synthesis with Audio-Driven and Blendshape-Based 3D Gaussian Splatting
PCA Lab, Key Lab of Intelligent Perception and Systems for High-Dimensional Information of Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院，教育部高维信息智能感知与系统重点实验室，PCA实验室）；Tsientang Institute for Advanced Study（浙江大学前沿交叉研究院）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学智能科学与技术学院）
All previous methods for audio-driven talking head generation assume the input audio to be clean with a neutral tone. As we show empirically, one can easily break these systems by simply adding certain background noise to the utterance or changing its emotional tone (to such as sad). To make talking head generation robust to such variations, we propose an explicit audio representation learning framework that disentangles audio sequences into various factors such as phonetic content, emotional tone, background noise and others. We conduct experiments to validate that conditioned on disentangled…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Despite previous success in generating audio-driven talking heads, most of the previous studies focus on the correlation between speech content and the mouth shape. Facial emotion, which is one of the most important features on natural human faces, is always neglected in their methods. In this work, we present Emotional Video Portraits (EVP), a system for synthesizing high-quality video portraits with vivid emotional dynamics driven by audios. Specifically, we propose the Cross-Reconstructed Emotion Disentanglement technique to decompose speech into two decoupled spaces, i.e., a duration-indep…
University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；Target Corporation（塔吉特公司）
This paper presents an audiovisual-based emotion recognition hybrid network. While most of the previous work focuses either on using deep models or hand-engineered features extracted from images, we explore multiple deep models built on both images and audio signals. Specifically, in addition to convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neutral networks (RNN) trained on facial images, the hybrid network also contains one SVM classifier trained on holistic acoustic feature vectors, one long short-term memory network (LSTM) trained on short-term feature sequences extracted from segmented…
