A Multimodal Emotion Recognition System: Integrating Facial Expressions, Body Movement, Speech, and Spoken Language

Abstract:Psychological evaluation relies on clinicians' observation and interpretation of a patient's emotional expression, which is susceptible to subjectivity, bias, fatigue, and inconsistency. This paper presents a multimodal emotion recognition system designed to support, rather than replace, the evaluator. The system combines facial expression recognition, speech emotion recognition, text-based emotion recognition of transcribed speech, and body movement analysis, and fuses their outputs into an emotional profile of class probabilities that is presented to the evaluator together with the overall prediction. Although the unimodal models achieve high accuracy on their benchmark test sets, a remote user study with 52 participants expressing seven emotional states shows that their accuracy falls to between 82.97% and 87.64% under realistic conditions, with individual emotional states recognised in as few as 48.08% of cases. Under the same conditions, the multimodal system achieves an accuracy of 96.43%, significantly higher than every single-modality component ($p < 10^{-4}$), with no emotional state below 92.31%. These results indicate that strong benchmark performance of a single channel does not transfer to realistic use, and that multimodal fusion provides the robustness required of a tool that supports psychological evaluation.

v2: Models revised to correct issues in the original implementation and results updated accordingly; text revised and restructured, architecture figures added, fusion stage formalised, references updated. 8 pages, 4 figures, 8 tables

Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Multimedia (cs.MM); Sound (cs.SD); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)

arXiv:2412.17907 [cs.HC]

(or arXiv:2412.17907v2 [cs.HC] for this version)