M3ER: Multiplicative Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using Facial, Textual, and Speech Cues

We present M3ER, a learning-based method for emotion recognition from multiple input modalities. Our approach combines cues from multiple co-occurring modalities (such as face, text, and speech) and also is more robust than other methods to sensor noise in any of the individual modalities. M3ER models a novel, data-driven multiplicative fusion method to combine the modalities, which learn to emphasize the more reliable cues and suppress others on a per-sample basis. By introducing a check step which uses Canonical Correlational Analysis to differentiate between ineffective and effective modalities, M3ER is robust to sensor noise. M3ER also generates proxy features in place of the ineffectual modalities. We demonstrate the efficiency of our network through experimentation on two benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and CMU-MOSEI. We report a mean accuracy of 82.7% on IEMOCAP and 89.0% on CMU-MOSEI, which, collectively, is an improvement of about 5% over prior work.

Take an Emotion Walk: Perceiving Emotions from Gaits Using Hierarchical Attention Pooling and Affective Mapping

We present an autoencoder-based semi-supervised approach to classify perceived human emotions from walking styles obtained from videos or from motion-captured data and represented as sequences of 3D poses. Given the motion on each joint in the pose at each time step extracted from 3D pose sequences, we hierarchically pool these joint motions in a bottom-up manner in the encoder, following the kinematic chains in the human body. We also constrain the latent embeddings of the encoder to contain the space of psychologically-motivated affective features underlying the gaits. We train the decoder to reconstruct the motions per joint per time step in a top-down manner from the latent embeddings. For the annotated data, we also train a classifier to map the latent embeddings to emotion labels. Our semi-supervised approach achieves a mean average precision of 0.84 on the Emotion-Gait benchmark dataset, which contains gaits collected from multiple sources. We outperform current state-of-art algorithms for both emotion recognition and action recognition from 3D gaits by 7% -- 23% on the absolute.

STEP: Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Emotion Perception from Gaits

We present a novel classifier network called STEP, to classify perceived human emotion from gaits, based on a Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) architecture. Given an RGB video of an individual walking, our formulation implicitly exploits the gait features to classify the emotional state of the human into one of four emotions: happy, sad, angry, or neutral. We use hundreds of annotated real-world gait videos and augment them with thousands of annotated synthetic gaits generated using a novel generative network called STEP-Gen, built on an ST-GCN based Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE). We incorporate a novel push-pull regularization loss in the CVAE formulation of STEP-Gen to generate realistic gaits and improve the classification accuracy of STEP. We also release a novel dataset (E-Gait), which consists of $2,177$ human gaits annotated with perceived emotions along with thousands of synthetic gaits. In practice, STEP can learn the affective features and exhibits classification accuracy of 89% on E-Gait, which is 14 - 30% more accurate over prior methods.

GraphRQI: Classifying Driver Behaviors Using Graph Spectrums

We present a novel algorithm (GraphRQI) to identify driver behaviors from road-agent trajectories. Our approach assumes that the road-agents exhibit a range of driving traits, such as aggressive or conservative driving. Moreover, these traits affect the trajectories of nearby road-agents as well as the interactions between road-agents. We represent these inter-agent interactions using unweighted and undirected traffic graphs. Our algorithm classifies the driver behavior using a supervised learning algorithm by reducing the computation to the spectral analysis of the traffic graph. Moreover, we present a novel eigenvalue algorithm to compute the spectrum efficiently. We provide theoretical guarantees for the running time complexity of our eigenvalue algorithm and show that it is faster than previous methods by 2 times. We evaluate the classification accuracy of our approach on traffic videos and autonomous driving datasets corresponding to urban traffic. In practice, GraphRQI achieves an accuracy improvement of up to 25% over prior driver behavior classification algorithms. We also use our classification algorithm to predict the future trajectories of road-agents.

DensePeds: Pedestrian Tracking in Dense Crowds Using Front-RVO and Sparse Features

We present a pedestrian tracking algorithm, DensePeds, that tracks individuals in highly dense crowds (greater than 2 pedestrians per square meter). Our approach is designed for videos captured from front-facing or elevated cameras. We present a new motion model called Front-RVO (FRVO) for predicting pedestrian movements in dense situations using collision avoidance constraints and combine it with state-of-the-art Mask R-CNN to compute sparse feature vectors that reduce the loss of pedestrian tracks (false negatives). We evaluate DensePeds on the standard MOT benchmarks as well as a new dense crowd dataset. In practice, our approach is 4.5 times faster than prior tracking algorithms on the MOT benchmark and we are state-of-the-art in dense crowd videos by over 2.6% on the absolute scale on average.

RoadTrack: Realtime Tracking of Road Agents in Dense and Heterogeneous Environments

We present a realtime tracking algorithm, RoadTrack, to track heterogeneous road-agents in dense traffic videos. Our approach is designed for traffic scenarios that consist of different road-agents such as pedestrians, two-wheelers, cars, buses, etc. sharing the road. We use the tracking-by-detection approach where we track a road-agent by matching the appearance or bounding box region in the current frame with the predicted bounding box region propagated from the previous frame. RoadTrack uses a novel motion model called the Simultaneous Collision Avoidance and Interaction (SimCAI) model to predict the motion of road-agents by modeling collision avoidance and interactions between the road-agents for the next frame. We demonstrate the advantage of RoadTrack on a dataset of dense traffic videos and observe an accuracy of 75.8% on this dataset, outperforming prior state-of-the-art tracking algorithms by at least 5.2%. RoadTrack operates in realtime at approximately 30 fps and is at least 4 times faster than prior tracking algorithms on standard tracking datasets.

RobustTP: End-to-End Trajectory Prediction for Heterogeneous Road-Agents in Dense Traffic with Noisy Sensor Inputs

We present RobustTP, an end-to-end algorithm for predicting future trajectories of road-agents in dense traffic with noisy sensor input trajectories obtained from RGB cameras (either static or moving) through a tracking algorithm. In this case, we consider noise as the deviation from the ground truth trajectory. The amount of noise depends on the accuracy of the tracking algorithm. Our approach is designed for dense heterogeneous traffic, where the road agents corresponding to a mixture of buses, cars, scooters, bicycles, or pedestrians. RobustTP is an approach that first computes trajectories using a combination of a non-linear motion model and a deep learning-based instance segmentation algorithm. Next, these noisy trajectories are trained using an LSTM-CNN neural network architecture that models the interactions between road-agents in dense and heterogeneous traffic. Our trajectory prediction algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods for end-to-end trajectory prediction using sensor inputs. We achieve an improvement of upto 18% in average displacement error and an improvement ofup to 35.5% in final displacement error at the end of the prediction window (5 seconds) over the next best method. All experiments were set up on an Nvidia TiTan Xp GPU. Additionally, we release a software framework, TrackNPred. The framework consists of implementations of state-of-the-art tracking and trajectory prediction methods and tools to benchmark and evaluate them on real-world dense traffic datasets.