In video-based emotion recognition, audio and visual modalities are often expected to have a complementary relationship, which is widely explored using cross-attention. However, they may also exhibit weak complementary relationships, resulting in poor representations of audio-visual features, thus degrading the performance of the system. To address this issue, we propose Dynamic Cross-Attention (DCA) that can dynamically select cross-attended or unattended features on the fly based on their strong or weak complementary relationship with each other, respectively. Specifically, a simple yet efficient gating layer is designed to evaluate the contribution of the cross-attention mechanism and choose cross-attended features only when they exhibit a strong complementary relationship, otherwise unattended features. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on the challenging RECOLA and Aff-Wild2 datasets. We also compare the proposed approach with other variants of cross-attention and show that the proposed model consistently improves the performance on both datasets.
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…
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…
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…
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）
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…
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 …
Indian Institute of Technology Ropar（印度理工学院罗巴尔分校）；University of Canberra（堪培拉大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
This paper details the sixth Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) challenge. EmotiW 2018 is a grand challenge in the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2018, Colorado, USA. The challenge aims at providing a common platform to researchers working in the affective computing community to benchmark their algorithms on `in the wild' data. This year EmotiW contains three sub-challenges: a) Audio-video based emotion recognition; b) Student engagement prediction; and c) Group-level emotion recognition. The databases, protocols and baselines are discussed in detail.
Mamba-Enhanced Text-Audio-Video Alignment Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations
College of Big Data and Internet（大数据与互联网学院）；Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学）；Institute of Advanced Computing and Digital Engineering（先进计算与数字工程研究所）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
In this work we tackle the task of video-based audio-visual emotion recognition, within the premises of the 2nd Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW2). Poor illumination conditions, head/body orientation and low image resolution constitute factors that can potentially hinder performance in case of methodologies that solely rely on the extraction and analysis of facial features. In order to alleviate this problem, we leverage both bodily and contextual features, as part of a broader emotion recognition framework. We choose to use a standard CNN-RNN cascade a…
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）
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）
Deep learning has been widely adopted in automatic emotion recognition and has lead to significant progress in the field. However, due to insufficient annotated emotion datasets, pre-trained models are limited in their generalization capability and thus lead to poor performance on novel test sets. To mitigate this challenge, transfer learning performing fine-tuning on pre-trained models has been applied. However, the fine-tuned knowledge may overwrite and/or discard important knowledge learned from pre-trained models. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a PathNet-based transfer l…
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…
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；Xperi Corporation（Xperi公司）
Emotion recognition has a pivotal role in affective computing and in human-computer interaction. The current technological developments lead to increased possibilities of collecting data about the emotional state of a person. In general, human perception regarding the emotion transmitted by a subject is based on vocal and visual information collected in the first seconds of interaction with the subject. As a consequence, the integration of verbal (i.e., speech) and non-verbal (i.e., image) information seems to be the preferred choice in most of the current approaches towards emotion recognitio…
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）
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…
PC-Talk: Precise Facial Animation Control for Audio-Driven Talking Face Generation
MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所MAIS部）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Psyche AI.INC（Psyche AI公司）；HKUST（香港科技大学）；CAIR, HKISI, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算智能研究所）；SCSE, FIE, M.U.S.T（M.U.S.T的SCSE、FIE部门）
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…
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…
Stories can have tremendous power -- not only useful for entertainment, they can activate our interests and mobilize our actions. The degree to which a story resonates with its audience may be in part reflected in the emotional journey it takes the audience upon. In this paper, we use machine learning methods to construct emotional arcs in movies, calculate families of arcs, and demonstrate the ability for certain arcs to predict audience engagement. The system is applied to Hollywood films and high quality shorts found on the web. We begin by using deep convolutional neural networks for audio…
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）
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…
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…
Powder AI Research（Powder AI 研究院）；Université Paris-Est, LISSI, UPEC（巴黎东大学 LISSI 实验室 / 巴黎东克雷泰伊大学）
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 …
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…
We propose a cross-modal co-attention model for continuous emotion recognition using visual-audio-linguistic information. The model consists of four blocks. The visual, audio, and linguistic blocks are used to learn the spatial-temporal features of the multi-modal input. A co-attention block is designed to fuse the learned features with the multi-head co-attention mechanism. The visual encoding from the visual block is concatenated with the attention feature to emphasize the visual information. To make full use of the data and alleviate over-fitting, cross-validation is carried out on the trai…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
