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Recognizing Emotions Conveyed by Human Gait

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Abstract

Humans convey emotions through different ways. Gait is one of them. Here we propose to use gait data to highlight features that characterize emotions. Gait analysis study usually focuses on stance phase, frequency, footstep length. Here the study is based on the joint angles obtained from inverse kinematics computation from the 3D motion-capture data using a combination of degrees of freedom (DOF) out of a 34DOF human body model obtained from inverse kinematics of markers 3D position. The candidates are four professional actors, and five emotional states are simulated: Neutral, Joy, Anger, Sadness, and Fear. The paper presents first a psychological approach which results are used to propose numerical approaches. The first study provides psychological results on motion perception and the possibility of emotion recognition from gait by 32 observers. Then, the motion data is studied using a feature vector approach to verify the numerical identifiability of the emotions. Finally each motion is tested against a database of reference motions to identify the conveyed emotion. Using the first and second study results, we utilize a 6DOF model then a 12DOF model. The experimental results show that by using the gait characteristics it is possible to characterize each emotion with good accuracy for intra-subject data-base. For inter-subject database results show that recognition is more prone to error, suggesting strong inter-personal differences in emotional features.

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Acknowledgments

This research is partially supported by a grant of the NeuroCreative Lab (NPO), by the funds of the “Women’s Future Development Organization”, and by the European project “COBOL”. The author thanks Mr. Stephane Dalberra from the Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Perception et de l’Action, Collège de France, Paris, France.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Gentiane Venture & Tianxiang Zhang

  2. University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

    Hideki Kadone

  3. Collège de France, Paris, France

    Alain Berthoz

  4. Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

    Julie Grèzes

  5. Department of Medicine, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Halim Hicheur

Authors
  1. Gentiane Venture
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  2. Hideki Kadone
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  3. Tianxiang Zhang
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  4. Julie Grèzes
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  5. Alain Berthoz
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  6. Halim Hicheur
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Correspondence to Gentiane Venture.

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Venture, G., Kadone, H., Zhang, T. et al. Recognizing Emotions Conveyed by Human Gait. Int J of Soc Robotics 6, 621–632 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-014-0243-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-014-0243-1

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