Audio-visual emotion recognition is the research of identifying human emotional states by combining the audio modality and the visual modality simultaneously, which plays an important role in intelligent human-machine interactions. With the help of deep learning, previous works have made great progress for audio-visual emotion recognition. However, these deep learning methods often require a large amount of data for training. In reality, data acquisition is difficult and expensive, especially for the multimodal data with different modalities. As a result, the training data may be in the low-data regime, which cannot be effectively used for deep learning. In addition, class imbalance may occur in the emotional data, which can further degrade the performance of audio-visual emotion recognition. To address these problems, we propose an efficient data augmentation framework by designing a multimodal conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) for audio-visual emotion recognition. Specifically, we design generators and discriminators for audio and visual modalities. The category information is used as their shared input to make sure our GAN can generate fake data of different categories. In addition, the high dependence between the audio modality and the visual modality in the generated multimodal data is modeled based on Hirschfeld-Gebelein-Rényi (HGR) maximal correlation. In this way, we relate different modalities in the generated data to approximate the real data. Then, the generated data are used to augment our data manifold. We further apply our approach to deal with the problem of class imbalance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a data augmentation strategy with a multimodal conditional GAN for audio-visual emotion recognition. We conduct a series of experiments on three public multimodal datasets, including eNTERFACE’05, RAVDESS, and CMEW. The results indicate that our multimodal conditional GAN has high effectiveness for data augmentation of audio-visual emotion recognition.

Audio-visual emotion recognition aims to distinguish human emotional states by integrating the audio and visual data acquired in the expression of emotions. It is crucial for facilitating the affect-related human-machine interaction system by enabling machines to intelligently respond to human emotions. One challenge of this problem is how to efficiently extract feature representations from audio and visual modalities. Although progresses have been made by previous works, most of them ignore common information between audio and visual data during the feature learning process, which may limit the performance since these two modalities are highly correlated in terms of their emotional information. To address this issue, we propose a deep learning approach in order to efficiently utilize common information for audio-visual emotion recognition by correlation analysis. Specifically, we design an audio network and a visual network to extract the feature representations from audio and visual data respectively, and then employ a fusion network to combine the extracted features for emotion prediction. These neural networks are trained by a joint loss, combining: (i) the correlation loss based on Hirschfeld-Gebelein-Rényi (HGR) maximal correlation, which extracts common information between audio data, visual data, and the corresponding emotion labels, and (ii) the classification loss, which extracts discriminative information from each modality for emotion prediction. We further generalize our architecture to the semi-supervised learning scenario. The experimental results on the eNTERFACE’05 dataset, BAUM-1s dataset, and RAVDESS dataset show that common information can significantly enhance the stability of features learned from different modalities, and improve the emotion recognition performance.