Simultaneous prediction of valence/arousal and emotion categories and its application in an HRC scenario

Abstract

We address the problem of facial expression analysis. The proposed approach predicts both basic emotion and valence/ arousal values as a continuous measure for the emotional state. Experimental results including cross-database evaluation on the AffectNet, Aff-Wild, and AFEW dataset shows that our approach predicts emotion categories and valence/arousal values with high accuracies and that the simultaneous learning of discrete categories and continuous values improves the prediction of both. In addition, we use our approach to measure the emotional states of users in an Human-Robot-Collaboration scenario (HRC), show how these emotional states are affected by multiple difficulties that arise for the test subjects, and examine how different feedback mechanisms counteract negative emotions users experience while interacting with a robot system.