Foreword

Affective Computing is a new area aiming to create intelligent computers that recognize, understand, and process human emotions. Affective Computing is an interdisciplinary area that encompasses a variety of disciplines, such as computer science, psychology, and cognitive science, among others. Emotion may be communicated in various ways, including gestures, postures, and facial expressions, as well as physiological signs, including brain activity, heart rate, muscle activity, blood pressure, and skin temperature. Humans can perceive emotion through facial expressions in general. However, not all emotions, particularly complex ones such as pride, love, mellowness, and sorrow, can be identified only through facial expressions. Physiological signals can therefore be utilized to represent complex emotions effectively.

This book aims to provide the audience with a basic understanding of Affective Computing and its application in many research fields. This state-of-the-art review of existing emotion theory and modeling approaches will help the readers explore various aspects of Affective Computing. By the end of the book, I hope that the readers will be able to understand emotion recognition methods based on audio, video, and physiological signals. Moreover, they will learn the fusion framework and familiarity to implement for emotion recognition.