Affective Computing: Classification and prediction of emotional states

“Affective Computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions” (R.W. Picard, MIT Press, 1997). Specifically, psychosocial equilibrium is now considered as a major issue for both individual and public health. Predicting human emotions via non-intrusive methods is a great challenge triggered by the rise of intelligent assisting systems. In order to determine the emotional state of a subject having a potential psychosocial disorder, it is required to process both neutral and expressive emotions. A computer-engineered method aiming to provide emotional information from videos is proposed. An original approach for affect classification and its interpretation is presented. The database is part of the HUMAINE database, and consists of a large volume of video clips, each displaying individuals, depressed or not, talking with a conversational agent. Both the high-dimensionality of data and its temporal aspect require a pre-training that consists of cleaning, sorting and feature selection, in order to make relevant information usable for further processing by Machine Learning methods. Next step consists in classifying the affective state of subjects according to their positivity or negativity (Russell's model, 1980). By means of six independent classifiers, each running a Support Vector Machine algorithm, separate performances are obtained for each class of emotions. The results reveal an interesting “neutral area phenomenon”, where emotions tend to be harder to be detected. Though more frequent, neutral emotions seem to carry less discriminant information than expressive ones. This issue will be a key for designing a tuning step in further research.