Papers › Context Based Emotion Recognition using EMOTIC Dataset

Context Based Emotion Recognition using EMOTIC Dataset

30 Mar 2020arXiv:2003.13401archive 2025-07-28

Ronak Kosti, Jose M. Alvarez, Adria Recasens, Agata Lapedriza

In our everyday lives and social interactions we often try to perceive the emotional states of people. There has been a lot of research in providing machines with a similar capacity of recognizing emotions. From a computer vision perspective, most of the previous efforts have been focusing in analyzing the facial expressions and, in some cases, also the body pose. Some of these methods work remarkably well in specific settings. However, their performance is limited in natural, unconstrained environments. Psychological studies show that the scene context, in addition to facial expression and body pose, provides important information to our perception of people's emotions. However, the processing of the context for automatic emotion recognition has not been explored in depth, partly due to the lack of proper data. In this paper we present EMOTIC, a dataset of images of people in a diverse set of natural situations, annotated with their apparent emotion. The EMOTIC dataset combines two different types of emotion representation: (1) a set of 26 discrete categories, and (2) the continuous dimensions Valence, Arousal, and Dominance. We also present a detailed statistical and algorithmic analysis of the dataset along with annotators' agreement analysis. Using the EMOTIC dataset we train different CNN models for emotion recognition, combining the information of the bounding box containing the person with the contextual information extracted from the scene. Our results show how scene context provides important information to automatically recognize emotional states and motivate further research in this direction. Dataset and code is open-sourced and available at: https://github.com/rkosti/emotic and link for the peer-reviewed published article: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8713881

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

rkosti/emotic officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
Tandon-A/emotic mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Emotion RecognitionEmotion Recognition in Context

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

EMOTIC

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Emotion Recognition in Context EMOTIC Fusion Model (scene sentiment + body features) mAP 29.45 #5 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Emotion Recognition in Context EMOTIC Fusion Model (scene + body features) mAP 27.70 #7 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Emotion Recognition in Context EMOTIC Fusion Model mAP 27.38 #8 of 9 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections