Deep Bimodal Regression of Apparent Personality Traits from Short Video Sequences

Apparent personality analysis (APA) is an important problem of personality computing, and furthermore, automatic APA becomes a hot and challenging topic in computer vision and multimedia. In this paper, we propose a deep learning solution to APA from short video sequences. In order to capture rich information from both the visual and audio modality of videos, we tackle these tasks with our Deep Bimodal Regression (DBR) framework. In DBR, for the visual modality, we modify the traditional convolutional neural networks for exploiting important visual cues. In addition, taking into account the model efficiency, we extract audio representations and build a linear regressor for the audio modality. For combining the complementary information from the two modalities, we ensemble these predicted regression scores by both early fusion and late fusion. Finally, based on the proposed framework, we come up with a solution for the Apparent Personality Analysis competition track in the ChaLearn Looking at People challenge in association with ECCV 2016. Our DBR is the winner (first place) of this challenge with 86 registered participants. Beyond the competition, we further investigate the performance of different loss functions in our visual models, and prove non-convex loss functions for regression are optimal on the human-labeled video data.