Integrating Emotion Recognition Tools for Developing Emotionally Intelligent Agents

Abstract

Emotionally responsive agents that can simulate emotional intelligence increase the acceptance of users towards them, as the feeling of empathy reduces negative perceptual feedback. This has fostered research on emotional intelligence during last decades, and nowadays numerous cloud and local tools for automatic emotional recognition are available, even for inexperienced users. These tools however usually focus on the recognition of discrete emotions sensed from one communication channel, even though multimodal approaches have been shown to have advantages over unimodal approaches. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to show our approach for multimodal emotion recognition using Kalman filters for the fusion of available discrete emotion recognition tools. The proposed system has been modularly developed based on an evolutionary approach so to be integrated in our digital ecosystems, and new emotional recognition sources can be easily integrated. Obtained results show improvements over unimodal tools when recognizing naturally displayed emotions.