DREAMER: A Database for Emotion Recognition Through EEG and ECG Signals From Wireless Low-cost Off-the-Shelf Devices

Abstract

In this paper, we present DREAMER, a multimodal database consisting of electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals recorded during affect elicitation by means of audio-visual stimuli. Signals from 23 participants were recorded along with the participants self-assessment of their affective state after each stimuli, in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance. All the signals were captured using portable, wearable, wireless, low-cost, and off-the-shelf equipment that has the potential to allow the use of affective computing methods in everyday applications. A baseline for participant-wise affect recognition using EEG and ECG-based features, as well as their fusion, was established through supervised classification experiments using support vector machines (SVMs). The self-assessment of the participants was evaluated through comparison with the self-assessments from another study using the same audio-visual stimuli. Classification results for valence, arousal, and dominance of the proposed database are comparable to the ones achieved for other databases that use nonportable, expensive, medical grade devices. These results indicate the prospects of using low-cost devices for affect recognition applications. The proposed database will be made publicly available in order to allow researchers to achieve a more thorough evaluation of the suitability of these capturing devices for affect recognition applications.