Multimodal Parametric Fusion for Emotion Recognition

Multimodal Parametric Fusion for Emotion Recognition

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of additional modalities on the performance of emotion recognition using speech, facial expression and physiological measurements. In order to compare different approaches, we designed a feature-based recognition system as a benchmark which carries out linear supervised classification followed by the leave-one-out cross-validation. For the classification of four emotions, it turned out that bimodal fusion in our experiment improves recognition accuracy of unimodal approach, while the performance of trimodal fusion varies strongly depending on the individual. Furthermore, we experienced extremely high disparity between single class recognition rates, while we could not observe a best performing single modality in our experiment. Based on these observations, we developed a novel fusion method, called parametric decision fusion (PDF), which lies in building emotion-specific classifiers and exploits advantage of a parametrized decision process. By using the PDF scheme we achieved 16% improvement in accuracy of subject-dependent recognition and 10% for subject-independent recognition compared to the best unimodal results.