End-to-End Modeling and Transfer Learning for Audiovisual Emotion Recognition in-the-Wild

As emotions play a central role in human communication, automatic emotion recognition has attracted increasing attention in the last two decades. While multimodal systems enjoy high performances on lab-controlled data, they are still far from providing ecological validity on non-lab-controlled, namely “in-the-wild” data. This work investigates audiovisual deep learning approaches to emotion recognition in in-the-wild problem. Inspired by the outstanding performance of end-to-end and transfer learning techniques, we explored the effectiveness of architectures in which a modality-specific Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is followed by a Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) using the AffWild2 dataset under the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) challenge protocol. We deployed unimodal end-to-end and transfer learning approaches within a multimodal fusion system, which generated final predictions using a weighted score fusion scheme. Exploiting the proposed deep-learning-based multimodal system, we reached a test set challenge performance measure of 48.1% on the ABAW 2020 Facial Expressions challenge, which advances the first-runner-up performance.