The AffectMove 2021 Challenge - Affect Recognition from Naturalistic Movement Data

We ran the first Affective Movement Recognition (AffectMove) challenge that brings together datasets of affective bodily behaviour across different real-life applications to foster work in this area. Research on automatic detection of naturalistic affective body expressions is still lagging behind detection based on other modalities whereas movement behaviour modelling is a very interesting and very relevant research problem for the affective computing community. The AffectMove challenge aimed to take advantage of existing body movement datasets to address key research problems of automatic recognition of naturalistic and complex affective behaviour from this type of data. Participating teams competed to solve at least one of three tasks based on datasets of different sensors types and real-life problems: multimodal EmoPain dataset for chronic pain physical rehabilitation context, weDraw-l Movement dataset for maths problem solving settings, and multimodal Unige-Maastricht Dance dataset. To foster work across datasets, we also challenged participants to take advantage of the data across datasets to improve performances and also test the generalization of their approach across different applications.