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Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has been widely used in the consumer field for control of smart home personal assistants, with many such devices on the market. However, with the increase in computational power, connectivity, and the need to enable people to live in the home for longer though the use of technology, then smart home assistants that could detect human emotion will improve the communication between a user and the assistant enabling the assistant of offer more productive feedback. Thus, the aim of this work is to analyze emotional states in speech and propose a suitable method considering performance verses complexity for deployment in Consumer Electronics home products, and to present a practical live demonstration of the research. In this article, a comprehensive approach has been introduced for the human speech-based emotion analysis. The 1-D convolutional neural network (CNN) has been implemented to learn and classify the emotions associated with human speech. The paper has been implemented on the standard datasets (emotion classification) Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS) and Toronto Emotional Speech Set database (TESS) (Young and Old). The proposed approach gives 90.48%, 95.79% and 94.47% classification accuracies in the aforementioned datasets. We conclude that the 1-D CNN classification models used in speaker-independent experiments are highly effective in the automatic prediction of emotion and are ideal for deployment in smart home assistants to detect emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges – the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are a variety of underlying factors influencing what and how people communicate in their daily life. The ability to capture and utilize these factors enables the conversational systems to generate favorable responses and set up amicable connections with users. In this work, we investigate two major factors in response generation, i.e., emotion and intention. To explore the dependency between them, we develop a hierarchical variational model that predicts in sequence the emotion and intention to be conveyed in a response. The response can then be generated word-by-word based on the predictions. We also apply a novel adversarial-augmented inference network to facilitate model training. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model as well as the novel adversarial objective. The hypothesis that emotion shapes human communication behavior is also validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual emotion analysis (VEA) has attracted great attention recently, due to the increasing tendency of expressing and understanding emotions through images on social networks. Different from traditional vision tasks, VEA is inherently more challenging since it involves a much higher level of complexity and ambiguity in human cognitive process. Most of the existing methods adopt deep learning techniques to extract general features from the whole image, disregarding the specific features evoked by various emotional stimuli. Inspired by the Stimuli-Organism-Response (S-O-R) emotion model in psychological theory, we proposed a stimuli-aware VEA method consisting of three stages, namely stimuli selection (S), feature extraction (O) and emotion prediction (R). First, specific emotional stimuli (i. e., color, object, face) are selected from images by employing the off-the-shelf tools. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to introduce stimuli selection process into VEA in an end-to-end network. Then, we design three specific networks, i. e., Global-Net, Semantic-Net and Expression-Net, to extract distinct emotional features from different stimuli simultaneously. Finally, benefiting from the inherent structure of Mikel’s wheel, we design a novel hierarchical cross-entropy loss to distinguish hard false examples from easy ones in an emotion-specific manner. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on four public visual emotion datasets. Ablation study and visualizations further prove the validity and interpretability of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]