Audio-Visual Affect Recognition through Multi-Stream Fused HMM for HCI

Zhihong Zeng, Jilin Tu, Brian Pianfetti, Ming Liu, Tong Zhang, ZhenQiu Zhang, Thomas S. Huang, Stephen E. Levinson

Abstract: Advances in computer processing power and emerging algorithms are allowing new ways of envisioning human computer interaction. This paper focuses on the development of a computing algorithm that uses audio and visual sensors to detect and track a user's affective state to aid computer decision making. Using our multi-stream fused hidden Markov model (MFHMM), we analyzed coupled audio and visual streams to detect 11 cognitive/emotive states. The MFHMM allows the building of an optimal connection among multiple streams according to the maximum entropy principle and the maximum mutual information criterion. Person-independent experimental results from 20 subjects in 660 sequences show that the MFHMM approach performs with an accuracy of 80.61% which outperforms face-only HMM, pitch-only HMM, energy-only HMM, and independent HMM fusion.