Classification of emotional states via transdermal cardiovascular spatiotemporal facial patterns using multispectral face videos

We describe a new method for remote emotional state assessment using multispectral face videos, and present our findings: unique transdermal, cardiovascular and spatiotemporal facial patterns associated with different emotional states. The method does not rely on stereotypical facial expressions but utilizes different wavelength sensitivities (visible spectrum, near-infrared, and long-wave infrared) to gauge correlates of autonomic nervous system activity spatially and temporally distributed across the human face (e.g., blood flow, hemoglobin concentration, and temperature). We conducted an experiment where 110 participants viewed 150 short emotion-eliciting videos and reported their emotional experience, while three cameras recorded facial videos with multiple wavelengths. Spatiotemporal multispectral features from the multispectral videos were used as inputs to a machine learning model that was able to classify participants’ emotional state (i.e., amusement, disgust, fear, sexual arousal, or no emotion) with satisfactory results (average ROC AUC score of 0.75), while providing feature importance analysis that allows the examination of facial occurrences per emotional state. We discuss findings concerning the different spatiotemporal patterns associated with different emotional states as well as the different advantages of the current method over existing approaches to emotion detection.