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Naturalistic Affective Expression Classification by a Multi-stage Approach Based on Hidden Markov Models

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 6975))

Abstract

In naturalistic behaviour, the affective states of a person change at a rate much slower than the typical rate at which video or audio is recorded (e.g. 25fps for video). Hence, there is a high probability that consecutive recorded instants of expressions represent a same affective content. In this paper, a multi-stage automatic affective expression recognition system is proposed which uses Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to take into account this temporal relationship and finalize the classification process. The hidden states of the HMMs are associated with the levels of affective dimensions to convert the classification problem into a best path finding problem in HMM. The system was tested on the audio data of the Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge (AVEC) datasets showing performance significantly above that of a one-stage classification system that does not take into account the temporal relationship, as well as above the baseline set provided by this Challenge. Due to the generality of the approach, this system could be applied to other types of affective modalities.

The original version of this chapter was revised. An Erratum for this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24571-8_75

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Meng, H., Bianchi-Berthouze, N. (2011). Naturalistic Affective Expression Classification by a Multi-stage Approach Based on Hidden Markov Models. In: D’Mello, S., Graesser, A., Schuller, B., Martin, JC. (eds) Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. ACII 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6975. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24571-8_49

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24571-8_49

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24570-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24571-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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