# InCarEmo: A Multimodal Dataset for In-Cabin Emotion Recognition and Driver State Monitoring

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14683 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14683/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

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- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [Tensor Fusion Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07250/) (2017)
- [LanguageBind: Extending Video-Language Pretraining to N-modality by Language-based Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01852/) (2023)
- [MOSI: Multimodal Corpus of Sentiment Intensity and Subjectivity Analysis in Online Opinion Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06259/) (2016)
- [Emotion-LLaMA: Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Reasoning with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11161/) (2024)
- [R1-Omni: Explainable Omni-Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05379/) (2025)
- [DDD17: End-To-End DAVIS Driving Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01458/) (2017)
- [HumanOmni: A Large Vision-Speech Language Model for Human-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15111/) (2025)
- [DMD: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Driver Monitoring Dataset for Attention and Alertness Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12085/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models Meet Text-Centric Multimodal Sentiment Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08068/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Contrastive Learning and Self-Training for Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Limited Labeled Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04447/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding driver emotion and state is critical for the next generation of intelligent in-cabin systems that ensure safety and enhance human-vehicle interaction. However, existing public datasets for in-cabin affective computing are largely limited to visual modalities and rarely include conversational information, making it difficult to capture the linguistic and interactive cues underlying driver emotion. To address these gaps, we introduce InCarEmo, a multimodal dataset for in-cabin emotion recognition and driver state monitoring. InCarEmo integrates RGB and infrared video, in-cabin audio, and dialogue text collected from scripted in-cabin scenarios designed to simulate realistic driver behaviors, covering diverse lighting conditions and driving contexts. The dataset supports three primary tasks: 1) multimodal emotion recognition, 2) fatigue detection, and 3) distraction monitoring. In addition to the original Chinese data, we construct an auxiliary English benchmark to support preliminary cross-lingual evaluation. We provide a unified benchmark with extensive baseline results across unimodal and multimodal methods, including analyses under modality-missing and noise conditions. Experimental results demonstrate the benefits of multimodal fusion and reveal remaining challenges under real-world noise and low-light conditions. By releasing InCarEmo, we aim to establish a comprehensive foundation for robust, interpretable, and human-centric in-cabin affective understanding, promoting safer and more empathetic driver-vehicle interaction.
