Improvement of Negative Emotion Recognition in Visible Images Enhanced by Thermal Imaging

Abstract

Facial expressions help in understanding the intentions of others as they are an essential means of communication, revealing human emotions. Recently, thermal imaging has been playing a complementary role in emotion recognition and is considered an alternative to overcome the drawbacks of visible imaging. Notably, a relatively severe recognition error of fear among negative emotions frequently occurs in visible imaging. This study aims to improve the recognition performance of fear by using the visible and thermal images acquired simultaneously. When fear was not recognized in a visible image, we analyzed the causes of misrecognition. We thus found the condition of replacing the image with a thermal image. It improved emotion recognition performance by 4.54% on average, compared to the performance of using only visible images. Finally, we confirmed that the thermal image effectively compensated for the visible image’s shortcomings.