This paper presents a novel ensemble framework to extract highly discriminative feature representation of image and its application for group-level happpiness intensity prediction in wild. In order to generate enough diversity of decisions, n convolutional neural networks are trained by bootstrapping the training set and extract n features for each image from them. A recurrent neural network (RNN) is then used to remember which network extracts better feature and generate the final feature representation for one individual image. Several group emotion models (GEM) are used to aggregate face fea- tures in a group and use parameter-optimized support vector regressor (SVR) to get the final results. Through extensive experiments, the great effectiveness of the proposed recurrent random deep ensembles (RRDE) is demonstrated in both structural and decisional ways. The best result yields a 0.55 root-mean-square error (RMSE) on validation set of HAPPEI dataset, significantly better than the baseline of 0.78.
@cite_14: Millions of images on the web enable us to explore images from social events such as a family party, thus it is of interest to understand and model the affect exhibited by a group of people in images. But analysis of the affect expressed by multiple people is challenging due to varied indoor and outdoor settings, and interactions taking place between various numbers of people. A few existing works on Group-level Emotion Recognition (GER) have investigated on face-level information. Due to the challenging environments, face may not provide enough information to GER. Relatively few studies have investigated multi-modal GER. Therefore, we propose a novel multi-modal approach based on a new feature description for understanding emotional state of a group of people in an image. In this paper, we firstly exploit three kinds of rich information containing face, upperbody and scene in a group-level image. Furthermore, in order to integrate multiple person's information in a group-level image, we propose an information aggregation method to generate three features for face, upperbody and scene, respectively. We fuse face, upperbody and scene information for robustness of GER against the challenging environments. Intensive experiments are performed on two challenging group-level emotion databases to investigate the role of face, upperbody and scene as well as multi-modal framework. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves very promising performance for GER.
@cite_22: The recent advancement of social media has given users a platform to socially engage and interact with a global population. With millions of images being uploaded onto social media platforms, there is an increasing interest in inferring the emotion and mood display of a group of people in images. Automatic affect analysis research has come a long way but has traditionally focussed on a single subject in a scene. In this paper, we study the problem of inferring the emotion of a group of people in an image. This group affect has wide applications in retrieval, advertisement, content recommendation and security. The contributions of the paper are: 1) a novel emotion labelled database of groups of people in images; 2) a Multiple Kernel Learning based hybrid affect inference model; 3) a scene context based affect inference model; 4) a user survey to better understand the attributes that affect the perception of affect of a group of people in an image. The detailed experimentation validation provides a rich baseline for the proposed database.
@cite_22 proposed a hybrid approach, which combines top-down and bottom-up components, where top-down information is extracted using scene descriptors and bottom-up information is extracted by analyzing the face of the members of a group. Later, @cite_14 came up with a multi-modal method combining face, upperbody and context information, where face upperbody is viewed as the bottom-up component and scene as top-down component. For representing an image, information aggregation was proposed to encode multiple people’s information for group-level image.