High-Level Context Representation for Emotion Recognition in Images

Abstract: Emotion recognition is the task of classifying perceived emotions in people. Previous works have utilized various nonverbal cues to extract features from images and correlate them to emotions. Of these cues, situational context is particularly crucial in emotion perception since it can directly influence the emotion of a person. In this paper, we propose an approach for high-level context representation extraction from images. The model relies on a single cue and a single encoding stream to correlate this representation with emotions. Our model competes with the state-of-the-art, achieving an mAP of 0.3002 on the EMOTIC dataset while also being capable of execution on consumer-grade hardware at approximately 90 frames per second. Overall, our approach is more efficient than previous models and can be easily deployed to address real-world problems related to emotion recognition.