The Composite Sensing of Affect

This paper describes some of the issues faced by typical emotion recognition systems and the need to be able to deal with emotions in a natural setting. Studies tend to ignore the dynamic, versatile and personalised nature of affective expression and the influence that social setting, context and culture have on its rules of display. Affective cues can be present in multiple modalities and they can manifest themselves in different temporal order. Thus, fusing the feature sets is challenging. We present a composite approach to affective sensing. The term composite is used to reflect the blending of information from multiple modalities with the available semantic evidence to enhance the emotion recognition process.