T-6: Emotion Recognition in the Next Generation: an Overview and
Recent Development
Presented by
Björn Schuller
Outline
Emotional aspects have recently attracted considerable attention as being the "next big thing" for dialog systems
and robotic product’s market success, and practically any intelligent Human-Machine Interface. Having matured
over the last decade of research, recognition technology is now becoming ready for usage in such systems, and many
further applications as Multimedia Retrieval and Surveillance. At the same time systems have evolved considerably
more complex: in addition to a variety of definitions and theoretical approaches, today’s engines demand subject
independency, coping with spontaneous and non prototypical emotions, robustness against noise, transmission, and
optimal system integration.
In this respect this tutorial will present an introduction to the recognition of emotion with a particular focus on
recent developments in audio-based analysis. A general introduction to researchers working in related fields will be
followed by current issues and impulses for acoustic, linguistic, and multi-stream and -modal analyses. A summary
of the main recognition techniques will be presented, as well as an overview on current challenges, datasets, studies
and performances in view of optimal future application design. Also, the first open source Emotion Recognition
Engine “openSMILE” developed in the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme Project SEMAINE will
be introduced to the participants in order for them to be directly able to experiment with emotion recognition from
speech or test latest technology on their datasets.
Speaker Biography
Björn Schuller received his diploma and his doctoral degree in electrical engineering and information technology for
his works in Automatic Speech and Emotion Recognition from TUM (Munich University of Technology), one of
Germany’s first three Excellence Universities, where he currently stays as senior researcher leading the work group on
Intelligent Speech and Music Processing and lecturer in Pattern Recognition and Speech Processing. He is a member
of the ISCA, ACM and IEEE, and authored and co-authored more than 100 publications in books, journals and
peer reviewed conference proceedings in the field of audiovisual signal processing and machine learning. Best known
are his works advancing Speech Processing and Affective Computing. He serves and served as associate editor and
reviewer for several scientific journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing,
the Elsevier Computer Speech and Language, Speech Communication, Neurocomputing, Signal Processing, and
Image and Vision Computing Journals, the IJPRAI, and the EURASIP Journals on Advances in Signal Processing
(JASP) and Audio Speech and Music Processing (JASMP), and as invited speaker, session organizer and chairman,
and programme committee member of numerous international conferences. Project steering board activities and
involvement in actual and past research projects in the field include SEMAINE dealing with Sensitive Artificial
Listeners funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013), the HUMAINE
CEICES initiative on Speech and Emotion, and projects funded by companies as BMW, Continental, Daimler,
Siemens, Toyota, and VDO dealing with real-life application of emotion. Advisory board activities comprise his
membership as invited expert in the W3C Emotion Incubator and Emotion Markup Language Groups for the
specification of EmotionML - an emotion markup language, and his election into the Executive Committee of the
HUMAINE Association for affective computing where he leads the Special Interest Group on Emotion Recognition
from Speech. Finally, he is a co-author of the first open source emotion recognition engine “openSMILE” to be
introduced at INTERSPEECH 2009.
