Multi-modal Neural Conditional Ordinal Random Fields for agreement level estimation

The ability to automatically detect the extent of agreement or disagreement a person expresses is an important indicator of inter-personal relations and emotion expression. Most of existing methods for automated analysis of human agreement from audio-visual data perform agreement detection using either audio or visual modality of human interactions. However, this is suboptimal as expression of different agreement levels is composed of various facial and vocal cues specific to the target level. To this end, we propose the first approach for multi-modal estimation of agreement intensity levels. Specifically, our model leverages the feature representation power of Multi-modal Neural Networks (NN) and discriminative power of Conditional Ordinal Random Fields (CORF) to achieve dynamic classification of agreement levels from videos. We show on the MAHNOB-Mimicry database of dyadic human interactions that the proposed approach outperforms its uni-modal and linear counterparts, and related models that can be applied to the target task.