·AI-enabled intelligent cockpit proactive affective interaction: middle-level feature fusion dual-branch deep learning network for driver emotion recognition

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology are propelling the rapid development of automotive intelligent cockpits. The active perception of driver emotions significantly impacts road traffic safety. Consequently, the development of driver emotion recognition technology is crucial for ensuring driving safety in the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) of the automotive intelligent cockpit. The ongoing advancements in AI technology offer a compelling avenue for implementing proactive affective interaction technology. This study introduced the multimodal driver emotion recognition network (MDERNet), a dual-branch deep learning network that temporally fused driver facial expression features and driving behavior features for non-contact driver emotion recognition. The proposed model was validated on publicly available datasets such as CK+, RAVDESS, DEAP, and PPB-Emo, recognizing discrete and dimensional emotions. The results indicated that the proposed model demonstrated advanced recognition performance, and ablation experiments confirmed the significance of various model components. The proposed method serves as a fundamental reference for multimodal feature fusion in driver emotion recognition and contributes to the advancement of ADAS within automotive intelligent cockpits.