Multimodal Local-Global Ranking Fusion for Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition is a core research area at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human communication analysis. It is a significant technical challenge since humans display their emotions through complex idiosyncratic combinations of the language, visual and acoustic modalities. In contrast to traditional multimodal fusion techniques, we approach emotion recognition from both direct person-independent and relative person-dependent perspectives. The direct person-independent perspective follows the conventional emotion recognition approach which directly infers absolute emotion labels from observed multimodal features. The relative person-dependent perspective approaches emotion recognition in a relative manner by comparing partial video segments to determine if there was an increase or decrease in emotional intensity. Our proposed model integrates these direct and relative prediction perspectives by dividing the emotion recognition task into three easier subtasks. The first subtask involves a multimodal local ranking of relative emotion intensities between two short segments of a video. The second subtask uses local rankings to infer global relative emotion ranks with a Bayesian ranking algorithm. The third subtask incorporates both direct predictions from observed multimodal behaviors and relative emotion ranks from local-global rankings for final emotion prediction. Our approach displays excellent performance on an audio-visual emotion recognition benchmark and improves over other algorithms for multimodal fusion.