  Group emotion recognition in the wild is a challenging problem, due to the
unstructured environments in which everyday life pictures are taken. Some of
the obstacles for an effective classification are occlusions, variable lighting
conditions, and image quality. In this work we present a solution based on a
novel combination of deep neural networks and Bayesian classifiers. The neural
network works on a bottom-up approach, analyzing emotions expressed by isolated
faces. The Bayesian classifier estimates a global emotion integrating top-down
features obtained through a scene descriptor. In order to validate the system
we tested the framework on the dataset released for the Emotion Recognition in
the Wild Challenge 2017. Our method achieved an accuracy of 64.68% on the test
set, significantly outperforming the 53.62% competition baseline.
