# Contextually-rich human affect perception using multimodal scene information

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06904 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06904/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [Deep Modular Co-Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10770/) (2019)
- [Training Deep Networks for Facial Expression Recognition with Crowd-Sourced Label Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01041/) (2016)
- [DFEW: A Large-Scale Database for Recognizing Dynamic Facial Expressions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05924/) (2020)
- [Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05913/) (2019)
- [Context Based Emotion Recognition using EMOTIC Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13401/) (2020)
- [EmotiCon: Context-Aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition using Frege's Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06692/) (2020)
- [Affective Image Content Analysis: Two Decades Review and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16125/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Semantic Scene Characteristics and Multi-Stream Convolutional Architectures in a Contextual Approach for Video-Based Visual Emotion Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07484/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Large Vision-Language Models as Emotion Recognizers in Context Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11300/) (2024)
- [A Heterogeneous Multimodal Graph Learning Framework for Recognizing User Emotions in Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07746/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The process of human affect understanding involves the ability to infer person specific emotional states from various sources including images, speech, and language. Affect perception from images has predominantly focused on expressions extracted from salient face crops. However, emotions perceived by humans rely on multiple contextual cues including social settings, foreground interactions, and ambient visual scenes. In this work, we leverage pretrained vision-language (VLN) models to extract descriptions of foreground context from images. Further, we propose a multimodal context fusion (MCF) module to combine foreground cues with the visual scene and person-based contextual information for emotion prediction. We show the effectiveness of our proposed modular design on two datasets associated with natural scenes and TV shows.
