Multi-Branch Network for Imagery Emotion Prediction
This work addresses the need for more accurate emotion prediction in images for applications like affective computing and human-computer interaction, though it is incremental by building on existing multi-context approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting emotions in images by incorporating multiple contextual sources like faces, bodies, and scenes, achieving a 28.4% mAP improvement and 0.93 MAE on the EMOTIC dataset.
For a long time, images have proved perfect at both storing and conveying rich semantics, especially human emotions. A lot of research has been conducted to provide machines with the ability to recognize emotions in photos of people. Previous methods mostly focus on facial expressions but fail to consider the scene context, meanwhile scene context plays an important role in predicting emotions, leading to more accurate results. In addition, Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) values offer a more precise quantitative understanding of continuous emotions, yet there has been less emphasis on predicting them compared to discrete emotional categories. In this paper, we present a novel Multi-Branch Network (MBN), which utilizes various source information, including faces, bodies, and scene contexts to predict both discrete and continuous emotions in an image. Experimental results on EMOTIC dataset, which contains large-scale images of people in unconstrained situations labeled with 26 discrete categories of emotions and VAD values, show that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with 28.4% in mAP and 0.93 in MAE. The results highlight the importance of utilizing multiple contextual information in emotion prediction and illustrate the potential of our proposed method in a wide range of applications, such as effective computing, human-computer interaction, and social robotics. Source code: https://github.com/BaoNinh2808/Multi-Branch-Network-for-Imagery-Emotion-Prediction