Towards unsupervised detection of affective body posture nuances

Abstract

Recently, researchers have been modeling three to nine discrete emotions for creating affective recognition systems. However, in every day life, humans use a rich and powerful language for defining a large variety of affective states. Thus, one of the challenging issues in affective computing is to give computers the ability to recognize a variety of affective states using unsupervised methods. In order to explore this possibility, we describe affective postures representing 4 emotion categories using low level descriptors. We applied multivariate analysis to recognize and categorize these postures into nuances of these categories. The results obtained show that low-level posture features may be used for this purpose, leaving the naming issue to interactive processes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.