This paper presents a novel deep neural network (DNN) for multimodal fusion of audio, video and text modalities for emotion recognition. The proposed DNN architecture has independent and shared layers which aim to learn the representation for each modality, as well as the best combined representation to achieve the best prediction. Experimental results on the AVEC Sentiment Analysis in the Wild dataset indicate that the proposed DNN can achieve a higher level of Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) than other state-of-the-art systems that perform early fusion of modalities at feature-level (i.e., concatenation) and late fusion at score-level (i.e., weighted average) fusion. The proposed DNN has achieved CCCs of 0.606, 0.534, and 0.170 on the development partition of the dataset for predicting arousal, valence and liking, respectively.
In this paper, a new dynamic facial expression recognition method is proposed. Dynamic facial expression recognition is formulated as a longitudinal groupwise registration problem. The main contributions of this method lie in the following aspects: 1) subject-specific facial feature movements of different expressions are described by a diffeomorphic growth model; 2) salient longitudinal facial expression atlas is built for each expression by a sparse groupwise image registration method, which can describe the overall facial feature changes among the whole population and can suppress the bias due to large intersubject facial variations; and 3) both the image appearance information in spatial domain and topological evolution information in temporal domain are used to guide recognition by a sparse representation method. The proposed framework has been extensively evaluated on five databases for different applications: the extended Cohn-Kanade, MMI, FERA, and AFEW databases for dynamic facial expression recognition, and UNBC-McMaster database for spontaneous pain expression monitoring. This framework is also compared with several state-of-the-art dynamic facial expression recognition methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the recognition rates of the new method are consistently higher than other methods under comparison.