Upper-body Hierarchical Graph for Skeleton Based Emotion Recognition in Assistive Driving

Emotion recognition plays a crucial role in enhancing the safety and enjoyment of assisted driving experiences. By enabling intelligent systems to perceive and understand human emotions, we can significantly improve human-machine interactions. Current research in emotion recognition emphasizes facial expressions, speech and physiological signals, often overlooking body movement's expressive potential. Existing most methods, reliant on full-body poses and graph convolutional networks with predetermined adjacency matrices, face challenges in driving scenarios, including limited visibility, restricted movement and imbalanced data distribution, which affect model generalization and accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we introduce an innovative emotion recognition method tailored for assisted driving. Our method leverages upper-body skeleton sequences, overcoming the constraints of full-body pose capture in driving contexts. Our architecture employs an upper-body hierarchical graph (UbH-Graph) to dynamically capture upper-body movement and emotional state relationships. We uniquely incorporate class-specific variations during training, balancing feature distribution and enhancing emotion recognition. Our method outperforms existing multimodal approaches on the assistive driving dataset and demonstrates robustness and adaptability on the daily action dataset.