Construction and validation of the Dalian emotional movement open-source set (DEMOS)

Abstract

Human body movements are important for emotion recognition and social communication and have received extensive attention from researchers. In this field, emotional biological motion stimuli, as depicted by point-light displays, are widely used. However, the number of stimuli in the existing material library is small, and there is a lack of standardized indicators, which subsequently limits experimental design and conduction. Therefore, based on our prior kinematic dataset, we constructed the Dalian Emotional Movement Open-source Set (DEMOS) using computational modeling. The DEMOS has three views (i.e., frontal 0°, left 45°, and left 90°) and in total comprises 2664 high-quality videos of emotional biological motion, each displaying happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral. All stimuli were validated in terms of recognition accuracy, emotional intensity, and subjective movement. The objective movement for each expression was also calculated. The DEMOS can be downloaded for free from https:// osf. io/ 83fst/. To our knowledge, this is the largest multi-view emotional biological motion set based on the whole body. The DEMOS can be applied in many fields, including affective computing, social cognition, and psychiatry.

Multi-view emotional expressions dataset using 2D pose estimation

“…Thirty-five standardized daily event scenarios (five for each emotion and neutral) with high recognition accuracy (82.9% - 100%, mean = 93.4%) were created to guide the actors in the recording phase. The specific content and validation of these scenarios and performances were introduced in our previous work 20 , 24 .…”

“…In recent decades, motion capture technology has made it possible to precisely capture and analyze the kinematic data of each joint 15 – 18 . A variety types of stimulus sets have emerged, including point-light displays 19 , 20 , video clips 21 , images 22 , or virtual agents 14 , 23 , 24 . The study of body movement has gradually shifted from concepted research to data-based quantitative research.…”

“…To ensure that all 22 actors expressed the instructed emotions equally well, that is, the reliability of these performances, we examined the consistency of the objective movement value across all of them. The objective movement of the recordings of frontal view in MEED was quantified using a customized MATLAB code 40 , 41 , and prior research has been demonstrated that this movement positively correlates with the intensity of emotion and the motion that observers can perceive from human body 20 , 42 , 43 . Specifically, if a pixel in two consecutive frames had a luminance change of more than 10 units, it was considered a pixel motion.…”