Annotation Efficiency in Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Deep Learning

In the fast pace of life, emotion recognition systems are essential to help monitor mental health and well-being. The continuous development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) improve the availability and accessibility to devices that can capture the facial expressions of a user, while wearable devices can also capture physiological signals and use them for emotion recognition. Meanwhile, machine learning and deep learning methods can provide emotion prediction models. However, the training of the models relies heavily on massive amounts of labeled data. The accuracy of data labels affects the success of the overall system. Research targeting emotion recognition uses the participants' self-reports as labels. However, participants often fail to give accurate self-reports, thus affecting the accuracy of the analysis. In this study, we examine the performance of the self-reports and external annotations for emotion recognition based on visual and physiological signals. Specifically, we use video data, as well as the Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Electroencephalogram (EEG), and Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals collected from wearable devices. We use two machine learning and three deep learning methods to process the signals and train the classifiers. The results show that the classifiers trained with external annotations offer better emotion recognition accuracy than self-reports. Also, the classifiers trained on facial expression offer better emotion prediction accuracy than the physiological signals, and the Deep Convolutional Network model shows the best results.