Continuous Affect Prediction using Eye Gaze

In recent times, there has been significant interest in the machine recognition of human emotions, due to the suite of applications to which this knowledge can be applied. A number of different modalities, such as speech or facial expression, individually and with eye gaze, have been investigated by the affective computing research community to either classify the emotion (e.g. sad, happy, angry) or predict the continuous values of affective dimensions (e.g. valence, arousal, dominance) at each moment in time. Surprisingly after an extensive literature review, eye gaze as a unimodal input to a continuous affect prediction system has not been considered. In this context, this paper evaluates the use of eye gaze as a unimodal input to a continuous affect prediction system. The performance of continuous prediction of arousal and valence using eye gaze is compared with the performance of a speech system using the AVEC 2014 speech feature set. The experimental evaluation when using eye gaze as the single modality in a continuous affect prediction system produced a correlation result for valence prediction that is better than the correlation result obtained with the AVEC 2014 speech feature set. Furthermore, the eye gaze feature set proposed in this paper contains 98% fewer features compared to the number of features in the AVEC 2014 feature set.