Automatic emotion recognition has become a trending research topic in the past decade. While works based on facial expressions or speech abound, recognising affect from body gestures remains a less explored topic. We present a new comprehensive survey hoping to boost research in the field. We first introduce emotional body gestures as a component of what is commonly known as "body language" and comment general aspects as gender differences and culture dependence. We then define a complete framework for automatic emotional body gesture recognition. We introduce person detection and comment static and dynamic body pose estimation methods both in RGB and 3D. We then comment the recent literature related to representation learning and emotion recognition from images of emotionally expressive gestures. We also discuss multi-modal approaches that combine speech or face with body gestures for improved emotion recognition. While pre-processing methodologies (e.g. human detection and pose estimation) are nowadays mature technologies fully developed for robust large scale analysis, we show that for emotion recognition the quantity of labelled data is scarce, there is no agreement on clearly defined output spaces and the representations are shallow and largely based on naive geometrical representations.

This paper presents a multimodal emotion recognition system, which is based on the analysis of audio and visual cues. From the audio channel, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Filter Bank Energies and prosodic features are extracted. For the visual part, two strategies are considered. First, facial landmarks' geometric relations, i.e., distances and angles, are computed. Second, we summarize each emotional video into a reduced set of key-frames, which are taught to visually discriminate between the emotions. In order to do so, a convolutional neural network is applied to key-frames summarizing videos. Finally, confidence outputs of all the classifiers from all the modalities are used to define a new feature space to be learned for final emotion label prediction, in a late fusion/stacking fashion. The experiments conducted on the SAVEE, eNTERFACE'05, and RML databases show significant performance improvements by our proposed system in comparison to current alternatives, defining the current state-of-the-art in all three databases.

Pain is a symptom of many disorders associated with actual or potential tissue damage in human body. Managing pain is not only a duty but also highly cost prone. The most primitive state of pain management is the assessment of pain. Traditionally it was accomplished by self-report or visual inspection by experts. However, automatic pain assessment systems from facial videos are also rapidly evolving due to the need of managing pain in a robust and cost effective way. Among different challenges of automatic pain assessment from facial video data two issues are increasingly prevalent: first, exploiting both spatial and temporal information of the face to assess pain level, and second, incorporating multiple visual modalities to capture complementary face information related to pain. Most works in the literature focus on merely exploiting spatial information on chromatic (RGB) video data on shallow learning scenarios. However, employing deep learning techniques for spatio-temporal analysis considering Depth (D) and Thermal (T) along with RGB has high potential in this area. In this paper, we present the first state-of-the-art publicly available database, 'Multimodal Intensity Pain (MIntPAIN)' database, for RGBDT pain level recognition in sequences. We provide a first baseline results including 5 pain levels recognition by analyzing independent visual modalities and their fusion with CNN and LSTM models. From the experimental evaluation we observe that fusion of modalities helps to enhance recognition performance of pain levels in comparison to isolated ones. In particular, the combination of RGB, D, and T in an early fusion fashion achieved the best recognition rate.

Motion planning algorithms have seen considerable progress and expansion across various domains of science and technology during the last few decades, where rapid advancements in path planning and trajectory optimization approaches have been made possible by the conspicuous enhancements brought, among others, by sampling-based methods and convex optimization strategies. Although they have been investigated from various perspectives in the existing literature, recent developments aimed at integrating robots into social, healthcare, industrial, and educational contexts have attributed greater importance to additional concepts that would allow them to communicate, cooperate, and collaborate with each other, as well as with human beings, in a meaningful and efficient manner. Therefore, in this survey, in addition to a brief overview of some of the essential aspects of motion planning algorithms, a few vital considerations required for assimilating robots into real-world applications, including certain instances of social, urban, and industrial environments, are introduced, followed by a critical discussion of a set of outstanding issues worthy of further investigation and development in future scientific studies.