Robust canonical correlation analysis: audio-visual fusion for learning continuous interest

The problem of automatically estimating the interest level of a subject has been gaining attention by researchers, mostly due to the vast applicability of interest detection. In this work, we obtain a set of continuous interest annotations for the SE-MAINE database, which we analyse also in terms of emotion dimensions such as valence and arousal. Most importantly, we propose a robust variant of Canonical Correlation Analysis (RCCA) for performing audio-visual fusion, which we apply to the prediction of interest. RCCA recovers a low-rank subspace which captures the correlations of fused modalities, while isolating gross errors in the data without making any assumptions regarding Gaussianity. We experimentally show that RCCA is more appropriate than other standard fusion techniques (such as l2-CCA and feature-level fusion), since it both captures interactions between modalities while also decontaminating the obtained subspace from errors which are dominant in real-world problems.