Method of Multi-Label Visual Emotion Recognition Fusing Fore-Background Features

This paper proposes a method for multi-label visual emotion recognition that fuses fore-background features to address the following issues that visual-based multi-label emotion recognition often overlooks: the impacts of the background that the person is placed in and the foreground, such as social interactions between different individuals on emotion recognition; the simplification of multi-label recognition tasks into multiple binary classification tasks; and it ignores the global correlations between different emotion labels. First, a fore-background-aware emotion recognition model (FB-ER) is proposed, which is a three-branch multi-feature hybrid fusion network. It efficiently extracts body features by designing a core region unit (CR-Unit) that represents background features as background keywords and extracts depth map information to model social interactions between different individuals as foreground features. These three features are fused at both the feature and decision levels. Second, a multi-label emotion recognition classifier (ML-ERC) is proposed, which captures the relationship between different emotion labels by designing a label co-occurrence probability matrix and cosine similarity matrix, and uses graph convolutional networks to learn correlations between different emotion labels to generate a classifier that considers emotion correlations. Finally, the visual features are combined with the object classifier to enable the multi-label recognition of 26 different emotions. The proposed method was evaluated on the Emotic dataset, and the results show an improvement of 0.732% in the mAP and 0.007 in the Jaccard’s coefficient compared with the state-of-the-art method.