A computational model for mood recognition

Abstract In an ambience designed to adapt to the user’s affective state, pervasive technology should be able to decipher unobtrusively his underlying mood. Great effort has been devoted to automatic punctual emotion recognition from visual input. Conversely, little has been done to recognize longer-lasting affective states, such as mood. Taking for granted the effectiveness of emotion recognition algorithms, we go one step further and propose a model for estimating the mood of an affective episode from a known sequence of punctual emotions. To validate our model experimentally, we rely on the human annotations of the well-established HUMAINE database. Our analysis indicates that we can approximate fairly accurately the human process of summarizing the emotional content of a video in a mood estimation. A moving average function with exponential discount of the past emotions achieves mood prediction accuracy above 60%.