Empathy Detection from Text, Audiovisual, Audio or Physiological Signals: A Systematic Review of Task Formulations and Machine Learning Methods

Affective states have a critical role in driving performance and safety. They can degrade driver situation awareness and negatively impact cognitive processes, severely diminishing road safety. Therefore, detecting and assessing drivers' affective states is crucial in order to help improve the driving experience, and increase safety, comfort and well-being. Recent advances in affective computing have enabled the detection of such states. This may lead to empathic automotive user interfaces that account for the driver's emotional state and influence the driver in order to improve safety. In this work, we propose a multiview multi-task machine learning method for the detection of driver's affective states using physiological signals. The proposed approach is able to account for inter-drive variability in physiological responses while enabling interpretability of the learned models, a factor that is especially important in systems deployed in the real world. We evaluate the models on thre …

In recent years, affective computing and its applications have become a fast-growing research topic. Furthermore, the rise of deep learning has introduced significant improvements in the emotion recognition system compared to classical methods. In this work, we propose a multi-modal emotion recognition model based on deep learning techniques using the combination of peripheral physiological signals and facial expressions. Moreover, we present an improvement to proposed models by introducing latent features extracted from our internal Bio Auto-Encoder (BAE). Both models are trained and evaluated on AMIGOS datasets reporting valence, arousal, and emotion state classification. Finally, to demonstrate a possible medical application in affective computing using deep learning techniques, we applied the proposed method to the assessment of anxiety therapy. To this purpose, a reduced multimodal database has been collected by recording facial expressions and peripheral signals such as electroca …

In recent years, the use of bio-sensing signals such as electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), etc. have garnered interest towards applications in affective computing. The parallel trend of deep-learning has led to a huge leap in performance towards solving various vision-based research problems such as object detection. Yet, these advances in deep-learning have not adequately translated into bio-sensing research. This work applies novel deep-learning-based methods to various bio-sensing and video data of four publicly available multi-modal emotion datasets. For each dataset, we first individually evaluate the emotion-classification performance obtained by each modality. We then evaluate the performance obtained by fusing the features from these modalities. We show that our algorithms outperform the results reported by other studies for emotion/valence/arousal/liking classification on DEAP and MAHNOB-HCI datasets and set up benchmarks for the newer AMIGOS and DREAMER data …

Affective computing has garnered the attention and interest of researchers in recent years, as there is a need for AI systems to better understand and react to human emotions. However, analyzing human emotions, such as mood or stress, is quite complex. While various stress studies use facial expressions and wearables, most existing datasets rely on processing data from a single modality. This paper presents EmpathicSchool, a novel dataset that captures facial expressions and the associated physiological signals, such as heart rate, electrodermal activity, and skin temperature, under different stress levels. The data was collected from 30 participants during different sessions for about ninety minutes each (for a total of 40 hours). The data includes seven different signal types, including both computer vision and physiological features that can be used to detect stress. In addition, various experiments were conducted to validate the signal quality.

A key challenge of affective computing research is discovering ways to reliably transfer affect models that are built in the laboratory to real world settings, namely in the wild. The existing gap between in vitro and in vivo affect applications is mainly caused by limitations related to affect sensing including intrusiveness, hardware malfunctions, availability of sensors, but also privacy and security. As a response to these limitations in this paper we are inspired by recent advances in machine learning and introduce the concept of privileged information for operating affect models in the wild. The presence of privileged information enables affect models to be trained across multiple modalities available in a lab setting and ignore modalities that are not available in the wild with no significant drop in their modeling performance. The proposed privileged information framework is tested in a game arousal corpus that contains physiological signals in the form of heart rate and electr …