Multimodal human emotion/expression recognition

Recognizing human facial expression and emotion by computer is an interesting and challenging problem. Many have investigated emotional contents in speech alone, or recognition of human facial expressions solely from images. However, relatively little has been done in combining these two modalities for recognizing human emotions. L.C. De Silva et al. (1997) studied human subjects' ability to recognize emotions from viewing video clips of facial expressions and listening to the corresponding emotional speech stimuli. They found that humans recognize some emotions better by audio information, and other emotions better by video. They also proposed an algorithm to integrate both kinds of inputs to mimic human's recognition process. While attempting to implement the algorithm, we encountered difficulties which led us to a different approach. We found these two modalities to be complimentary. By using both, we show it is possible to achieve higher recognition rates than either modality alone.