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. 2016 Sep 15:4:e2364.
doi: 10.7717/peerj.2364. eCollection 2016.

Emotion recognition using Kinect motion capture data of human gaits

Shun Li  1 , Liqing Cui  1 , Changye Zhu  2 , Baobin Li  2 , Nan Zhao  3 , Tingshao Zhu  3
Affiliations

Emotion recognition using Kinect motion capture data of human gaits

Shun Li et al. PeerJ. .

Abstract

Automatic emotion recognition is of great value in many applications, however, to fully display the application value of emotion recognition, more portable, non-intrusive, inexpensive technologies need to be developed. Human gaits could reflect the walker's emotional state, and could be an information source for emotion recognition. This paper proposed a novel method to recognize emotional state through human gaits by using Microsoft Kinect, a low-cost, portable, camera-based sensor. Fifty-nine participants' gaits under neutral state, induced anger and induced happiness were recorded by two Kinect cameras, and the original data were processed through joint selection, coordinate system transformation, sliding window gauss filtering, differential operation, and data segmentation. Features of gait patterns were extracted from 3-dimentional coordinates of 14 main body joints by Fourier transformation and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The classifiers NaiveBayes, RandomForests, LibSVM and SMO (Sequential Minimal Optimization) were trained and evaluated, and the accuracy of recognizing anger and happiness from neutral state achieved 80.5% and 75.4%. Although the results of distinguishing angry and happiness states were not ideal in current study, it showed the feasibility of automatically recognizing emotional states from gaits, with the characteristics meeting the application requirements.

Keywords: Affective computing; Emotion recognition; Gait; Kinect; Machine learning.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare there are no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. The experiment scene.
Figure 2
Figure 2. The schematic of the experiment environment.
Figure 3
Figure 3. The procedures of the first round experiment.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Stick figure and location of body joint centers recorded by Kinect.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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