Deformable Convolutional LSTM for Human Body Emotion Recognition

People represent their emotions in a myriad of ways. Among the most important ones is whole body expressions which have many applications in different fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI). One of the most important challenges in human emotion recognition is that people express the same feeling in various ways using their face and their body. Recently many methods have tried to overcome these challenges using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, most of these methods were based on images or on facial expressions only and did not consider deformation that may happen in the images such as scaling and rotation which can adversely affect the recognition accuracy. In this work, motivated by recent researches on deformable convolutions, we incorporate the deformable behavior into the core of convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) to improve robustness to these deformations in the image and, consequently, improve its accuracy on the emotion recognition task from videos of arbitrary length. We did experiments on the GEMEP dataset and achieved state-of-the-art accuracy of 98.8% on the task of whole human body emotion recognition on the validation set.