Multi-Corpus Learning for Audio–Visual Emotions and Sentiment Recognition

Abstract

Recognition of emotions and sentiment (affective states) from human audio–visual information is widely used in healthcare, education, entertainment, and other fields; therefore, it has become a highly active research area. The large variety of corpora with heterogeneous data available for the development of single-corpus approaches for recognition of affective states may lead to approaches trained on one corpus being less effective on another. In this article, we propose a multi-corpus learned audio–visual approach for emotion and sentiment recognition. It is based on the extraction of mid-level features at the segment level using two multi-corpus temporal models (a pretrained transformer with GRU layers for the audio modality and pre-trained 3D CNN with BiLSTM-Former for the video modality) and on predicting affective states using two single-corpus cross-modal gated self-attention fusion (CMGSAF) models. The proposed approach was tested on the RAMAS and CMU-MOSEI corpora. To date, our approach has outperformed state-of-the-art audio–visual approaches for emotion recognition by 18.2% (78.1% vs. 59.9%) for the CMU-MOSEI corpus in terms of the Weighted Accuracy and by 0.7% (82.8% vs. 82.1%) for the RAMAS corpus in terms of the Unweighted Average Recall.

Keywords

• audio–visual-based affective states recognition
• emotion recognition
• sentiment recognition
• gated modality fusion
• self-attention fusion
• multi-corpus learning