Machines Perceive Emotions: Identifying Affective States from Human Gait Using On-Body Smart Devices

Abstract

Emotions are a crucial part of our daily lives, and they are defined as an organism’s complex reaction to significant objects or events, which include subjective and physiological components. Human emotion recognition has a variety of commercial applications, including intelligent automobile systems, affect-sensitive systems for customer service and contact centres, and the entertainment sector. In this work, we present a novel deep neural network of the Convolutional Neural Network - Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (CNN-RNN) that can classify six basic emotions with an accuracy of above 95%. The deep model was trained on human gait data captured with body-mounted inertial sensors. We also proposed a reduction in the input space by utilizing 1D magnitudes of 3D accelerations and 3D angular velocities (maga^, magω^), which not only minimizes the computational complexity but also yields better classification accuracies. We compared the performance of the proposed model with existing methodologies and observed that the model outperforms the state-of-the-art.