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Automatic detection of the level of human interest is of high relevance for many technical applications, such as automatic customer care or tutoring systems. However, the recognition of spontaneous interest in natural conversations independently of the subject remains a challenge. Identification of human affective states relying on single modalities only is often impossible, even for humans, since different modalities contain partially disjunctive cues. Multimodal approaches to human affect recognition generally are shown to boost recognition performance, yet are evaluated in restrictive laboratory settings only. Herein we introduce a fully automatic processing combination of Active-Appearance-Model-based facial expression, vision-based eyeactivity estimation, acoustic features, linguistic analysis, non-linguistic vocalisations, and temporal context information in an early feature fusion process. We provide detailed subject-independent results for classification and regression of the Level of Interest using Support-Vector Machines on an audiovisual interest corpus (AV IC) consisting of spontaneous, conversational speech demonstrating "theoretical" effectiveness of the approach. Further, to evaluate the approach with regards to real-life usability a user-study is conducted for proof of "practical" effectiveness.

Automatically recognizing human emotions from spontaneous and non-prototypical real-life data is currently one of the most challenging tasks in the field of affective computing. This article presents our recent advances in assessing dimensional representations of emotion, such as arousal, expectation, power, and valence, in an audiovisual human-computer interaction scenario. Building on previous studies which demonstrate that long-range context modeling tends to increase accuracies of emotion recognition, we propose a fully automatic audiovisual recognition approach based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) modeling of word-level audio and video features. LSTM networks are able to incorporate knowledge about how emotions typically evolve over time so that the inferred emotion estimates are produced under consideration of an optimal amount of context. Extensive evaluations on the Audiovisual Sub-Challenge of the 2011 Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge show how acoustic, linguistic, and visual features contribute to the recognition of different affective dimensions as annotated in the SEMAINE database. We apply the same acoustic features as used in the challenge baseline system whereas visual features are computed via a novel facial movement feature extractor. Comparing our results with the recognition scores of all Audiovisual Sub-Challenge participants, we find that the proposed LSTM-based technique leads to the best average recognition performance that has been reported for this task so far.