Incorporating Scene Context and Semantic Labels for Enhanced Group-level Emotion Recognition

Group-level emotion recognition (GER) aims to identify holistic emotions within a scene involving multiple individuals. Current existed methods underestimate the importance of visual scene contextual information in modeling individual relationships. Furthermore, they overlook the crucial role of semantic information from emotional labels for complete understanding of emotions. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework that incorporates visual scene context and label-guided semantic information to improve GER performance. It involves the visual context encoding module that leverages multi-scale scene information to diversely encode individual relationships. Complementarily, the emotion semantic encoding module utilizes group-level emotion labels to prompt a large language model to generate nuanced emotion lexicons. These lexicons, in conjunction with the emotion labels, are then subsequently refined into comprehensive semantic representations through the utilization of a structured emotion tree. Finally, similarity-aware interaction is proposed to align and integrate visual and semantic information, thereby generating enhanced group-level emotion representations and subsequently improving the performance of GER. Experiments on three widely adopted GER datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.