Recognizing Emotions Conveyed by Human Gait

Abstract

Humans convey emotions through different ways. Gait is one of them. Here we propose to use gait data to highlight features that characterize emotions. Gait analysis study usually focuses on stance phase, frequency, footstep length.Here the study is based on the joint angles obtained from inverse kinematics computation from the 3D motion-capture data using a combination of degrees of freedom (DOF) out of a 34DOF human body model obtained from inverse kinematics of markers 3D position. The candidates are four professional actors, and five emotional states are simulated: Neutral, Joy, Anger, Sadness, and Fear. The paper presents first a psychological approach which results are used to propose numerical approaches. The first study provides psychological results on motion perception and the possibility of emotion recognition from gait by 32 observers. Then, the motion data is studied using a feature vector approach to verify the numerical identifiability of the emotions. Finally each motion is tested against a database of reference motions to identify the conveyed emotion. Using the first and second study results, we utilize a 6DOF model then a 12DOF model. The experimental results show that by using the gait characteristics it is possible to characterize each emotion with good accuracy for intra-subject data-base. For inter-subject database results show that recognition is more prone to error, suggesting strong inter-personal differences in emotional features.

Using Dynamics to Recognize Human Motion

“…Gait is rich in information and it was shown extensively in our previous work that biometrics from gait is possible [23], as well as emotion recognition using the torso motion and the head inclination, with a simple similarity index [13]. Using the same dataset of 4 candidates and 5 repetitions of each emotional gait, which is extensively described in [13], the individual emotion recognition rate reaches 90 % in average. For further detail in the protocol and the results please refer to our works [13,23] (Fig.…”

“…Some studies [12,13] consider only the movement of the extremities and or the torso since they are of low dimensions, what is often called the task space in robotics [11]. Labanotation system describes the displacement of weigh (weight transfer) and the displacement of the parts of body, and the way of its displacements in physical space [5] (=task space).…”

“…Using the same dataset of 4 candidates and 5 repetitions of each emotional gait, which is extensively described in [13], the individual emotion recognition rate reaches 90 % in average. For further detail in the protocol and the results please refer to our works [13,23] (Fig. 3).…”

“…Fig. 3 Feature vector in the PC space for the four basic emotions in 5 gait trial for a given individual [13]. "Sadness" strikes out the rest of the emotions.…”

“…Walking is one of the key actions when identifying the information on humans. It is known that human walking includes information that is specific to the individual and be affected by mood [13,24,25]. That is, it is thought that the EMG analysis of walking is effective in the identification of human mood.…”