The first audio/visual emotion challenge and workshop – an introduction

The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (http://sspnet. eu/avec2011) is the first competition event aimed at comparison of automatic audio, visual, and audiovisual emotion analysis. The goal of the challenge is to provide a common benchmark test set for individual multimodal information processing and to bring together the audio and video emotion recognition communities, to compare the relative merits of the two approaches to emotion recognition under well-defined and strictly comparable conditions, and establish to what extent fusion of the approaches is possible and beneficial. A second motivation is the need to advance emotion recognition systems to be able to deal with naturalistic behavior in large volumes of un-segmented, non-prototypical and non-preselected data as this is exactly the type of data that real systems have to face in the real world. Three emotion detection sub-challenges were addressed: emotion detection from audio, from video, or from audiovisual information. As benchmarking database the SEMAINE database of naturalistic dialogues was used. Emotion needed to be recognized in terms of positive/negative valence, and high and low activation (arousal), expectancy, and power.