Smart sensor integration: A framework for multimodal emotion recognition in real-time

Affect sensing by machines has been argued as an essential part of next-generation human-computer interaction (HCI). To this end, in the recent years a large number of studies have been conducted, which report automatic recognition of emotion as a difficult, but feasible task. However most effort has been put towards offline analysis, whereas to date only few applications exist, which are able to react to a user´s emotion in real-time. In response to this deficit we introduce a framework we call Smart Sensor Integration (SSI), which considerably jump-starts the development of multimodal online emotion recognition (OER) systems. In particular SSI supports the pattern recognition pipeline by offering tailored tools for data segmentation, feature extraction, and pattern recognition, as well as, tools to apply them offline (training phase) and online (real-time recognition). Furthermore, it has been designed to handle input from various input modalities and to suit the fusion of multimodal information.