Multimodal fusion of audio, scene, and face features for first impression estimation

Affective computing, particularly emotion and personality trait recognition, is of increasing interest in many research disciplines. The interplay of emotion and personality shows itself in the first impression left on other people. Moreover, the ambient information, e.g. the environment and objects surrounding the subject, also affect these impressions. In this work, we employ pre-trained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to extract facial emotion and ambient information from images for predicting apparent personality. We also investigate Local Gabor Binary Patterns from Three Orthogonal Planes video descriptor and acoustic features extracted via the popularly used openSMILE tool. We subsequently propose classifying features using a Kernel Extreme Learning Machine and fusing their predictions. The proposed system is applied to the ChaLearn Challenge on First Impression Recognition, achieving the winning test set accuracy of 0.913, averaged over the “Big Five” personality traits.