Diagnosis of depression by behavioural signals: A multimodal approach

Quantifying behavioural changes in depression using affective computing techniques is the first step in developing an objective diagnostic aid, with clinical utility, for clinical depression. As part of the AVEC 2013 Challenge, we present a multimodal approach for the Depression Sub-Challenge using a GMM-UBM system with three different kernels for the audio subsystem and Space Time Interest Points in a Bag-of-Words approach for the vision subsystem. These are then fused at the feature level to form the combined AV system. Key results include the strong performance of acoustic audio features and the bag-of-words visual features in predicting an individual’s level of depression using regression. Interestingly, in the context of the small amount of literature on the subject, is that our feature level multimodal fusion technique is able to outperform both the audio and visual challenge baselines.