Spatial-Temporal Recurrent Neural Network for Emotion Recognition

Emotion analysis is a crucial problem to endow artifact machines with real intelligence in many large potential applications. As external appearances of human emotions, electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and video face signals are widely used to track and analyze human's affective information. According to their common characteristics of spatial-temporal volumes, in this paper we propose a novel deep learning framework named spatial-temporal recurrent neural network (STRNN) to unify the learning of two different signal sources into a spatial-temporal dependency model. In STRNN, to capture those spatially cooccurrent variations of human emotions, a multi-directional recurrent neural network (RNN) layer is employed to capture longrange contextual cues by traversing the spatial region of each time slice from multiple angles. Then a bi-directional temporal RNN layer is further used to learn discriminative temporal dependencies from the sequences concatenating spatial features of each time slice produced from the spatial RNN layer. To further select those salient regions of emotion representation, we impose sparse projection onto those hidden states of spatial and temporal domains, which actually also increases the model discriminant ability because of this global consideration. Consequently, such a two-layer RNN model builds spatial dependencies as well as temporal dependencies of the input signals. Experimental results on the public emotion datasets of EEG and facial expression demonstrate the proposed STRNN method is more competitive over those state-of-the-art methods.