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Human emotion recognition (HER) allows the assessment of an affective state of a subject. Until recently, such emotional states were described in terms of discrete emotions, like happiness or contempt. In order to cover a high range of emotions, researchers in the field have introduced different dimensional spaces for emotion description that allow the characterization of affective states in terms of several variables or dimensions that measure distinct aspects of the emotion. One of the most common of such dimensional spaces is the bidimensional Arousal/Valence space. To the best of our knowledge, all HER systems so far have modelled independently, the dimensions in these dimensional spaces. In this paper, we study the effect of modelling the output dimensions simultaneously and show experimentally the advantages in modeling them in this way. We consider a multimodal approach by including features from the Electroencephalogram and a few physiological signals. For modelling the multiple outputs, we employ a multiple output regressor based on support vector machines. We also include an stage of feature selection that is developed within an embedded approach known as Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), proposed initially for SVM. The results show that several features can be eliminated using the multiple output support vector regressor with RFE without affecting the performance of the regressor. From the analysis of the features selected in smaller subsets via RFE, it can be observed that the signals that are more informative into the arousal and valence space discrimination are the EEG, Electrooculogram/Electromiogram (EOG/EMG) and the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR).

The study of brain electrical activity (BEA) from different cognitive conditions has attracted a lot of interest in the last decade due to the high number of possible applications that could be generated from it. In this work, a discriminative framework for BEA via electroencephalography (EEG) is proposed based on multi-output Gaussian Processes (MOGPs) with a specialized spectral kernel. First, a signal segmentation stage is executed, and the channels from the EEG are used as the model outputs. Then, a novel covariance function within the MOGP known as the multispectral mixture kernel (MOSM) allows us to find and quantify the relationships between different channels. Several MOGPs are trained from different conditions grouped in bi-class problems, and the discrimination is performed based on the likelihood score of the test signals against all the models. Finally, the mean likelihood is computed to predict the correspondence of new inputs with each class’s existing models. Results show that this framework allows us to model the EEG signals adequately using generative models and allows analyzing the relationships between channels of the EEG for a particular condition. At the same time, the set of trained MOGPs is well suited to discriminate new input data.

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