Audio-visual affect recognition in activation-evaluation space

The ability of a computer to detect and appropriately respond to changes in a user's affective state has significant implications to human-computer interaction (HCI). To more accurately simulate the human ability to assess affects through multi-sensory data, automatic affect recognition should also make use of multimodal data. In this paper, we present our efforts toward audio-visual affect recognition. Based on psychological research, we have chosen affect categories based on an activation-evaluation space which is robust in capturing significant aspects of emotion. We apply the Fisher boosting learning algorithm which can build a strong classifier by combining a small set of weak classification functions. Our experimental results show with 30 Fisher features, the testing error rates of our bimodal affect recognition is about 16% on the evaluation axis and 13% on the activation axis.