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Call for Participation / Papers

Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2011)

in conjunction with ACII 2011, October 9, Memphis, Tennessee, USA

http://sspnet.eu/avec2011/
http://www.acii2011.org/

Register and download data and features:
http://avec-db.sspnet.eu/accounts/register/

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The Challenge
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The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2011) will be the first competition event aimed at comparison of automatic audio, visual and audiovisual emotion analysis. The goal of the challenge is to provide a common benchmark test set for individual multimodal information processing and to bring together the audio and video emotion recognition communities, to compare the relative merits of the two approaches to emotion recognition under well-defined and strictly comparable conditions and establish to what extent fusion of the approaches is possible and beneficial. A second motivation is the need to advance emotion recognition systems to be able to deal with naturalistic behaviour in large volumes of un-segmented, non-prototypical and non-preselected data as this is exactly the type of data that both multimedia retrieval and human-machine/human-robot communication interfaces have to face in the real world.

We are calling for teams to participate in three emotion detection sub-challenges: emotion detection from audio, from video, or from audiovisual information. As benchmarking database the SEMAINE database of naturalistic dialogues will be used. Emotion will have to be recognized in terms of positive/negative valence, and high and low arousal, expectancy and power.

Besides participation in the Challenge we are calling for papers addressing the overall topics of this workshop, in particular works that address the differences between audio and video processing of emotive data, and the issues concerning combined audio-visual emotion recognition.

Three Sub-Challenges are addressed:

•In the Audio Sub-Challenge, arousal, valence, expectancy, and power will need to be classified using exclusively audio feature information as binary problem (above/below average) on word level.
•In the Video Sub-Challenge, arousal, valence, expectancy, and power will need to be classified using exclusively video feature information as binary problem (above/below average) on frame level.
•In the Audiovisual Sub-Challenge, arousal, valence, expectancy, and power will need to be classified using audiovisual feature information as binary problem (above/below average) on word level.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Participation in the Challenge
•Audio Sub-Challenge
•Video Sub-Challenge
•Audiovisual Sub-Challenge

Audio/Visual Emotion Recognition
•Audio-based Emotion Recognition
•Video-based Emotion Recognition
•Novel Fusion Techniques
•Prediction as Fusion
•Cross-corpus Feature Relevance
•Agglomeration of Data
•Semi-supervised Learning
•Synthesized Training Material

Application
•Multimedia Coding and Retrieval
•Usability of Audio/Visual Emotion Recognition
•Real-time Issues


Important Dates
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Paper submission
July 18, 2011

Notification of acceptance
July 26, 2011

Final challenge result submission
July 29, 2011

Camera ready paper
July 31, 2011

Workshop
October 9, 2011


Organisers
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Björn Schuller (Tech. Univ. Munich, Germany)
Michel Valstar (Imperial College London, UK)
Roddy Cowie (Queen's University Belfast, UK)
Maja Pantic (Imperial College London, UK)


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