SONIC: Synergizing VisiON Foundation Models for Stress RecogNItion from ECG signals

Stress recognition through physiological signals such as Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals has garnered significant attention. Traditionally, research in this field predominantly focused on utilizing handcrafted features or raw signals as inputs for learning algorithms. However, there is now a burgeoning interest within the community in leveraging large-scale vision foundation models (VFMs) like ResNet50, VGG19, and others. These VFMs are increasingly preferred due to their ability to capture complex features, enhancing the accuracy and effectiveness of stress recognition systems. However, no particular focus has been given on combining these VFMs. The combination of VFMs offers promising benefits by harnessing their collective knowledge to extract richer representations for improved stress recognition. So, to mitigate this research gap, we focus on combining different VFMs for stress recognition from ECG and propose SONIC, a novel framework that combines VFMs through their logits and training a fully connected network on the combined logits. Through extensive experimentation, SONIC showed the top performance against individual VFMs performance on the WESAD benchmark. With SONIC, we report state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in WESAD with 99.36% and 99.24% (stress vs non-stress) and 97.66% and 97.10% (amusement vs stress vs baseline) in accuracy and F1 respectively.