# Survey on Emotional Body Gesture Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.07481 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07481/

## Key facts

- Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00285/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Micro-action Recognition: Dataset, Methods, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05234/) (2024)
- [Responsible AI: Gender bias assessment in emotion recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11436/) (2021)
- [Levels of explainable artificial intelligence for human-aligned conversational explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03178/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Physiological Signal Based Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10466/) (2022)
- [Unlocking the Emotional World of Visual Media: An Overview of the Science, Research, and Impact of Understanding Emotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13463/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations: A Survey of Methods, Trends, Challenges and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20511/) (2025)
- [Uncovering the Limits of Text-based Emotion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01900/) (2021)
- [Identity-free Artificial Emotional Intelligence via Micro-Gesture Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13206/) (2024)
- [Emotion Recognition for Healthcare Surveillance Systems Using Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05989/) (2021)
- [CatFLW: Cat Facial Landmarks in the Wild Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04232/) (2023)
- [Joint Contrastive Learning with Feature Alignment for Cross-Corpus EEG-based Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09559/) (2024)
- [Two in One Go: Single-stage Emotion Recognition with Decoupled Subject-context Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17205/) (2024)
- [AU-Aware Vision Transformers for Biased Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06609/) (2022)
- [Regional Attention Network (RAN) for Head Pose and Fine-grained Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06634/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning for Group-level Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15276/) (2024)
- [Hybrid-supervised Hypergraph-enhanced Transformer for Micro-gesture Based Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14867/) (2025)
- [iMiGUE-3K: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Micro-Gesture Analysis with Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17179/) (2026)
- [Video Sentiment Analysis with Bimodal Information-augmented Multi-Head Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02362/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper than Tracking: a Survey of Computer-Vision Based Recognition of Animal Pain and Affective States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08405/) (2022)
- [Automatic Analysis of Human Body Representations in Western Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08860/) (2022)
- [FAF: A novel multimodal emotion recognition approach integrating face, body and text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15425/) (2022)
- [Designing Data: Proactive Data Collection and Iteration for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10319/) (2023)
- [EmoTwiCS: A Corpus for Modelling Emotion Trajectories in Dutch Customer Service Dialogues on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06536/) (2023)
- [EEG-SCMM: Soft Contrastive Masked Modeling for Cross-Corpus EEG-Based Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09186/) (2024)
- [Emotion Recognition from Skeleton Data: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18026/) (2025)
- [Anatomy of a Feeling: Narrating Embodied Emotions via Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19595/) (2025)
- [Can AI detect pain and express pain empathy? A review from emotion recognition and a human-centered AI perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04249/) (2021)
- [Forecasting Nonverbal Social Signals during Dyadic Interactions with Generative Adversarial Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09378/) (2021)
- [Emotion recognition in talking-face videos using persistent entropy and neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13571/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic emotion recognition has become a trending research topic in the past decade. While works based on facial expressions or speech abound, recognizing affect from body gestures remains a less explored topic. We present a new comprehensive survey hoping to boost research in the field. We first introduce emotional body gestures as a component of what is commonly known as "body language" and comment general aspects as gender differences and culture dependence. We then define a complete framework for automatic emotional body gesture recognition. We introduce person detection and comment static and dynamic body pose estimation methods both in RGB and 3D. We then comment the recent literature related to representation learning and emotion recognition from images of emotionally expressive gestures. We also discuss multi-modal approaches that combine speech or face with body gestures for improved emotion recognition. While pre-processing methodologies (e.g. human detection and pose estimation) are nowadays mature technologies fully developed for robust large scale analysis, we show that for emotion recognition the quantity of labelled data is scarce, there is no agreement on clearly defined output spaces and the representations are shallow and largely based on naive geometrical representations.