Speech Emotion Recognition based on SVM as Both Feature Selector and Classifier

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to utilize Support Vector Machine (SVM) as feature selection and classification techniques for audio signals to identify human emotional states. One of the major bottlenecks of common speech emotion recognition techniques is to use a huge number of features per utterance which could significantly slow down the learning process, and it might cause the problem known as ―the curse of dimensionality‖. Consequently, to ease this challenge this paper aims to achieve high accuracy system with a minimum set of features. The proposed model uses two methods, namely ―SVM features selection‖ and the common ―Correlation-based Feature Subset Selection (CFS)‖ for the feature dimensions reduction part. In addition, two different classifiers, one Support Vector Machine and the other Neural Network are separately adopted to identify the six emotional states of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and neutral. The method has been verified using Persian (Persian ESD) and German (EMO-DB) emotional speech databases, which yield high recognition rates in both databases. The results show that SVM feature selection method provides better emotional speech-recognition performance compared to CFS and baseline feature set. Moreover, the new system is able to achieve a recognition rate of (99.44%) on the Persian ESD and (87.21%) on Berlin Emotion Database for speaker-dependent classification. Besides, promising result (76.12%) is obtained for speaker-independent classification case; which is among the best-known accuracies reported on the mentioned database relative to its little number of features.