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Gaze-enhanced Crossmodal Embeddings for Emotion Recognition

Ahmed Abdou, Ekta Sood, Philipp Müller, Andreas Bulling

Proc. International Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA), pp. 1–18, 2022.




Abstract

Emotional expressions are inherently multimodal – integrating facial behavior, speech, and gaze – but their automatic recognition is often limited to a single modality, e.g. speech during a phone call. While previous work proposed crossmodal emotion embeddings to improve monomodal recognition performance, despite its importance, a representation of gaze was not included. We propose a new approach to emotion recognition that incorporates an explicit representation of gaze in a crossmodal emotion embedding framework. We show that our method outperforms the previous state of the art for both audio-only and video-only emotion classification on the popular One-Minute Gradual Emotion Recognition dataset. Furthermore, we report extensive ablation experiments and provide insights into the performance of different state-of-the-art gaze representations and integration strategies. Our results not only underline the importance of gaze for emotion recognition but also demonstrate a practical and highly effective approach to leveraging gaze information for this task.

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BibTeX

@inproceedings{abdou22_etra, title = {Gaze-enhanced Crossmodal Embeddings for Emotion Recognition}, author = {Abdou, Ahmed and Sood, Ekta and Müller, Philipp and Bulling, Andreas}, year = {2022}, booktitle = {Proc. International Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA)}, doi = {10.1145/3530879}, volume = {6}, pages = {1--18} }