Features For Speech Emotion Recognition Research Articles

Deep temporal clustering features for speech emotion recognition

Deep clustering is a popular unsupervised technique for feature representation learning. We recently proposed the chunk-based DeepEmoCluster framework for speech emotion recognition (SER) to adopt the concept of deep clustering as a novel semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework, which achieved improved recognition performances over conventional reconstruction-based approaches. However, the vanilla DeepEmoCluster lacks critical sentence-level temporal information that is useful for SER tasks. This study builds upon the DeepEmoCluster framework, creating a powerful SSL approach that leverages temporal information within a sentence. We propose two sentence-level temporal modeling alternatives using either the temporal-net or the triplet loss function, resulting in a novel temporal-enhanced DeepEmoCluster framework to capture essential temporal information. The key contribution to achieving this goal is the proposed sentence-level uniform sampling strategy, which preserves the original temporal order of the data for the clustering process. An extra network module (e.g., gated recurrent unit) is utilized for the temporal-net option to encode temporal information across the data chunks. Alternatively, we can impose additional temporal constraints by using the triplet loss function while training the DeepEmoCluster framework, which does not increase model complexity. Our experimental results based on the MSP-Podcast corpus demonstrate that the proposed temporal-enhanced framework significantly outperforms the vanilla DeepEmoCluster framework and other existing SSL approaches in regression tasks for the emotional attributes arousal, dominance, and valence. The improvements are observed in fully-supervised learning or SSL implementations. Further analyses validate the effectiveness of the proposed temporal modeling, showing (1) high temporal consistency in the cluster assignment, and (2) well-separated emotional patterns in the generated clusters.

Multiscale-multichannel feature extraction and classification through one-dimensional convolutional neural network for Speech emotion recognition

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a crucial field of research in artificial intelligence and human–computer interaction. Extracting effective speech features for emotion recognition is a continuing research focus in SER. Most research has focused on finding an optimal speech feature to extract hidden local features while ignoring the global relationships of the speech signal. In this paper, we propose a method that utilizes a multiscale-multichannel feature extraction structure with global and local information to obtain comprehensive speech features. Our approach employs a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN) for feature learning and emotion recognition, capturing both spectral and spatial characteristics of speech for superior learning capabilities with improved SER results. We conducted extensive experiments on publicly available emotion recognition datasets, employing three distinct data augmentation (DA) techniques to enhance model generalization. Our model utilized Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and zero-crossing rate features from speech samples for training and outperformed state-of-the-art techniques in terms of accuracy. Additionally, we conducted experiments to validate the effectiveness and reliability of our proposed method.

Variational mode decomposition based acoustic and entropy features for speech emotion recognition

Automated speech emotion recognition (SER) is a machine-based method for identifying emotion from speech signals. SER has many practical applications, including improving man-machine interaction (MMI), online customer support, healthcare services, online marketing, etc. Because of the wide range of applications, the popularity of SER has been increasing among researchers for three decades. Numerous studies employed various combinations of features and classifiers to improve emotion classification performance. In our study, we tried to achieve the same by using variational mode decomposition (VMD)-based features. We extracted features like MFCC, mel-spectrogram, approximate entropy (ApEn), and permutation entropy (PrEn) from each VMD mode. The performance of emotion classification is evaluated using the deep neural network (DNN) classifier and the proposed VMD-based features individually (MFCC, mel-spectrogram, ApEn, and PrEn) and in combination (MFCC + mel-spectrogram + ApEn + PrEn). We used two datasets, RAVDESS and EMO-DB, to evaluate the emotion classification performance and obtained a classification accuracy of 91.59% and 80.83% for the EMO-DB and RAVDESS datasets, respectively. Our experimental results were compared with the other methods, and we found that the proposed VMD-based feature combinations with a DNN classifier performed better than the state-of-the-art works in SER.

An evolutionary optimization method for selecting features for speech emotion recognition

Human-computer interactions benefit greatly from emotion recognition from speech. To promote a contact-free environment in this coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID’19) pandemic situation, most digitally based systems used speech-based devices. Consequently, this emotion detection from speech has many beneficial applications for pathology. The vast majority of speech emotion recognition (SER) systems are designed based on machine learning or deep learning models. Therefore, need greater computing power and requirements. This issue was addressed by developing traditional algorithms for feature selection. Recent research has shown that nature-inspired or evolutionary algorithms such as equilibrium optimization (EO) and cuckoo search (CS) based meta-heuristic approaches are superior to the traditional feature selection (FS) models in terms of recognition performance. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of feature selection meta-heuristic approaches on emotion recognition from speech. To achieve this, we selected the rayerson audio-visual database of emotional speech and song (RAVDESS) database and obtained maximum recognition accuracy of 89.64% using the EO algorithm and 92.71% using the CS algorithm. For this final step, we plotted the associated precision and F1 score for each of the emotional classes.

Modulation spectral features for speech emotion recognition using deep neural networks

This work explores the use of constant-Q transform based modulation spectral features (CQT-MSF) for speech emotion recognition (SER). The human perception and analysis of sound comprise of two important cognitive parts: early auditory analysis and cortex-based processing. The early auditory analysis considers spectrogram-based representation whereas cortex-based analysis includes extraction of temporal modulations from the spectrogram. This temporal modulation representation of spectrogram is called modulation spectral feature (MSF). As the constant-Q transform (CQT) provides higher resolution at emotion salient low-frequency regions of speech, we find that CQT-based spectrogram, together with its temporal modulations, provides a representation enriched with emotion-specific information. We argue that CQT-MSF when used with a 2-dimensional convolutional network can provide a time-shift invariant and deformation insensitive representation for SER. Our results show that CQT-MSF outperforms standard mel-scale based spectrogram and its modulation features on two popular SER databases, Berlin EmoDB and RAVDESS. We also show that our proposed feature outperforms the shift and deformation invariant scattering transform coefficients, hence, showing the importance of joint hand-crafted and self-learned feature extraction instead of reliance on complete hand-crafted features. Finally, we perform Grad-CAM analysis to visually inspect the contribution of constant-Q modulation features over SER.

Learning multi-scale features for speech emotion recognition with connection attention mechanism

Speech emotion recognition (SER) has become a crucial topic in the field of human–computer interactions. Feature representation plays an important role in SER, but there are still many challenges in feature representation such as the inability to predict which features are most effective for SER and the cultural differences in emotion expression. Most previous studies use a single type of feature for the recognition task or conduct early fusion of features. However, a single type of feature cannot well reflect the emotions of speech signals. Also, different features contain different information, direct fusion cannot integrate the advantages of different features. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a parallel network for multi-scale SER based on a connection attention mechanism (AMSNet). AMSNet fuses fine-grained frame-level manual features with coarse-grained utterance-level deep features. Meanwhile, it adopts different speech emotion feature extraction modules according to the temporal and spatial features of speech signals, which enriches features and improves feature characterization. The network consists of a frame-level representation learning module (FRLM) based on the time structure and an utterance-level representation learning module (URLM) based on the global structure. Besides, improved attention-based long short-term memory (LSTM) is introduced into FRLM to focus on the frames that contribute more to the final emotion recognition result. In URLM, a convolutional neural network with the squeeze-and-excitation block (SCNN) is introduced to extract deep features. In addition, the connection attention mechanism is proposed for feature fusion, which applies different weights to different features. Extensive experiments are conducted on the IEMOCAP and EmoDB datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and performance superiority of AMSNet. Our code will be publicly available at https://codeocean.com/capsule/8636967/tree/v1.

Learning affective representations based on magnitude and dynamic relative phase information for speech emotion recognition

The complete acoustic features include magnitude and phase information. However, traditional speech emotion recognition methods only focus on the magnitude information and ignore the phase data, and will inevitably miss some information. This study explores the accurate extraction and effective use of phase features for speech emotion recognition. First, the reflection of speech emotion in the phase spectrum is analyzed, and a quantitative analysis shows that phase data contain information that can be used to distinguish emotions. A dynamic relative phase (DRP) feature extraction method is then proposed to solve the problem in which the original relative phase (RP) has difficulty determining the base frequency and further alleviating the dependence of the phase on the clipping position of the frame. Finally, a single-channel model (SCM) and a multi-channel model with an attention mechanism (MCMA) are constructed to effectively integrate the phase and magnitude information. By introducing phase information, more complete acoustic features are captured, which enriches the emotional representations. The experiments were conducted using the Emo-DB and IEMOCAP databases. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DRP for speech emotion recognition, as well as the complementarity between the phase and magnitude information in speech emotion recognition.

Improved speech emotion recognition with Mel frequency magnitude coefficient

Automatic speech emotion recognition using machine learning is a demanding research topic in the field of affective computing. Identifying the speech features for speech emotion recognition is a challenging issue as the feature needs to emphasize the information about emotion from the speech. Spectral features play a vital role in emotion recognition from speech signals. In this paper, two modifications are made in the extraction of Mel frequency cepstral coefficient, they are, using magnitude spectrum instead of energy spectrum and exclusion of discrete cosine transform and extract Mel Frequency Magnitude Coefficient. Mel frequency magnitude coefficient is the log of magnitude spectrum on a non-linear Mel scale frequency. Mel frequency magnitude coefficient and three conventional spectral features, Mel frequency cepstral coefficient, log frequency power coefficient and linear prediction cepstral coefficient are tested on Berlin, Ravdess, Savee, EMOVO, eNTERFACE and Urdu databases with multiclass support vector machine as the classifier. Mel frequency magnitude coefficient as a stand alone feature recognizes emotion with an accuracy of 81.50% for Berlin, 64.31% for Ravdess, 75.63% for Savee, 73.30% for EMOVO, 56.41% for eNTERFACE and 95.25% for Urdu databases. Mel frequency magnitude coefficient is found to be the better spectral feature for the identification of emotion from speech compared to the conventional features.

Exploiting the potentialities of features for speech emotion recognition

In recent years, studies on speech signals have increasingly paid attention to emotional information. The most challenging aspect in speech emotion recognition (SER) is choosing the optimal speech feature representation. According to the statistical analysis, the roles of each speech feature differ under different emotions, indicating that different features have different abilities in distinguishing emotions. This study proposes an emotional-category based feature weighting (ECFW) method, which aims at finding the prominence of each feature under different emotions and applying this prominence as priori knowledge. Furthermore, previous studies have paid little attention to matching the relationship between speech features and models. This study argues that different combinations of models and features result in large differences in the performance of SER, which are evaluated by several experiments. Features must be modeled with appropriate approaches to extract the most valuable information for emotional representation. Then, the best combinations of features and models are selected to test our method. The method is applied on three commonly used speech emotion databases, IEMOCAP, MASC, and EMO-DB. The results show that ECFW significantly improves the performance of SER tasks.

Databases, Features and Classification Techniques for Speech Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition is a rapidly growing research field. Emotions can be effectively expressed through speech and can provide insight about speaker’s intentions. Although, humans can easily interpret emotions through speech, physical gestures, and eye movement but to train a machine to do the same with similar preciseness is quite a challenging task. SER systems can improve human-machine interaction when used with automatic speech recognition, as emotions have the tendency to change the semantics of a sentence. Many researchers have contributed their extremely impressive work in this research area, leading to development of numerous classification, feature selection, feature extraction and emotional speech databases. This paper reviews recent accomplishments in the area of speech emotion recognition. It also present a detailed review of various types of emotional speech databases, and different classification techniques which can be used individually or in combination and a brief description of various speech features for emotion recognition.

Ensemble Learning of Hybrid Acoustic Features for Speech Emotion Recognition

Automatic recognition of emotion is important for facilitating seamless interactivity between a human being and intelligent robot towards the full realization of a smart society. The methods of signal processing and machine learning are widely applied to recognize human emotions based on features extracted from facial images, video files or speech signals. However, these features were not able to recognize the fear emotion with the same level of precision as other emotions. The authors propose the agglutination of prosodic and spectral features from a group of carefully selected features to realize hybrid acoustic features for improving the task of emotion recognition. Experiments were performed to test the effectiveness of the proposed features extracted from speech files of two public databases and used to train five popular ensemble learning algorithms. Results show that random decision forest ensemble learning of the proposed hybrid acoustic features is highly effective for speech emotion recognition.

Glowworm swarm based fuzzy classifier with dual features for speech emotion recognition

Nowadays, a great attention is focusing on the study of the emotional content in speech signals since the speech signal is one of the quickest and natural tactic to communicate among humans, and thus, many systems have been suggested to recognize the emotional content of a spoken utterance. This paper schemes two contributions: Gender recognition and Emotion recognition. In the first contribution, there has two phases: feature extraction and classification. The pitch feature is extracted and given for classification using k-Nearest Neighboring classifier. In the second contribution, features like Non-Negative Matrix Factorization and pitch are extracted and given as the input to Adaptive Fuzzy classifier to recognize the respective emotions. In addition, the limits of membership functions are optimally chosen using a renowned optimization algorithm namely glowworm swarm optimization (GSO). Thus the proposed adaptive Fuzzy classifier using GSO is termed as GSO-FC. The performance of proposed model is compared to other conventional algorithms like Grey Wolf Optimization, FireFly, Particle Swarm Optimization, Artificial Bee Colony and Genetic Algorithm in correspondence with varied performance measures like Accuracy, Sensitivity, Specificity, Precision, False positive rate, False negative rate, Negative Predictive Value, False Discovery Rate, F1 Score and Mathews correlation coefficient.

Parallelized Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network With Spectral Features for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech is the most effective way for people to exchange complex information. Recognition of emotional information contained in speech is one of the important challenges in the field of artificial intelligence. To better acquire emotional features in speech signals, a parallelized convolutional recurrent neural network (PCRN) with spectral features is proposed for speech emotion recognition. First, frame-level features are extracted from each utterance and, a long short-term memory is employed to learn these features frame by frame. At the same time, the deltas and delta-deltas of the log Mel-spectrogram are calculated and reconstructed into three channels (static, delta, and delta-delta); these 3-D features are learned by a convolutional neural network (CNN). Then, the two learned high-level features are fused and batch normalized. Finally, a SoftMax classifier is used to classify emotions. Our PCRN model simultaneously processes two different types of features in parallel to better learn the subtle changes in emotion. The experimental results on four public datasets show the superiority of our proposed method, which is better than the previous works.

Exploration of Complementary Features for Speech Emotion Recognition Based on Kernel Extreme Learning Machine

Previous studies of speech emotion recognition using either empirical features (e.g., F0, energy, and voice probability) or spectrogram-based statistical features. The empirical features can highlight the human knowledge of emotion recognition, while the statistical features enable a general representation, but they do not emphasize human knowledge sufficiently. However, the use of these two kinds of features together can complement some features that may be unconsciously used by humans in daily life but have not been realized yet. Based on this consideration, this paper proposes a dynamic fusion framework to utilize the potential advantages of the complementary spectrogram-based statistical features and the auditory-based empirical features. In addition, a kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) is adopted as the classifier to distinguish emotions. To validate the proposed framework, we conduct experiments on two public emotional databases, including Emo-DB and IEMOCAP databases. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fusion framework significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. The results also show that the proposed method, by integrating the auditory-based features with spectrogram-based features, could achieve a notably improved performance over the conventional methods.

Prominence features: Effective emotional features for speech emotion recognition

Emotion-related feature extraction is a challenging task in speech emotion recognition. Due to the lack of discriminative acoustic features, classical approaches based on traditional acoustic features could not provide satisfactory performances. This research proposes a novel type of feature related to prominence, which, together with traditional acoustic features, are used to classify seven typical different emotional states. To this end, the author group produces a Chinese Dual-mode Emotional Speech Database (CDESD), which contains additional prominence and paralinguistic annotation information. Then, a consistency assessment algorithm is presented to validate the reliability of the annotation information of this database. The results show that the annotation consistency on prominence reaches more than 60% on average. Subsequently, this research analyzes the correlation of the prominence features with emotional states using a curve fitting method. Prominence is found to be closely related to emotion states, to retain emotional information at the word level to the greatest possible extent and to play an important role in emotional expression. Finally, the proposed prominence features are validated on CDESD through speaker-dependent and speaker-independent experiments with four commonly used classifiers. The results show that the average recognition rate achieved using the combined features is improved by 6% in speaker-dependent experiments and by 6.2% in speaker-independent experiments compared with that achieved using only acoustic features.

An optimal two stage feature selection for speech emotion recognition using acoustic features

Feature Fusion plays an important role in speech emotion recognition to improve the classification accuracy by combining the most popular acoustic features for speech emotion recognition like energ...

Exploitation of Phase-Based Features for Whispered Speech Emotion Recognition

Features for speech emotion recognition are usually dominated by the spectral magnitude information while they ignore the use of the phase spectrum because of the difficulty of properly interpreting it. Motivated by recent successes of phase-based features for speech processing, this paper investigates the effectiveness of phase information for whispered speech emotion recognition. We select two types of phase-based features (i.e., modified group delay features and all-pole group delay features), both which have shown wide applicability to all sorts of different speech analysis and are now studied in whispered speech emotion recognition. When exploiting these features, we propose a new speech emotion recognition framework, employing outer product in combination with power and L2 normalization. The according technique encodes any variable length sequence of the phase-based features into a fixed dimension vector regardless of the length of the input sequence. The resulting representation is fed to train a classification model with a linear kernel classifier. Experimental results on the Geneva Whispered Emotion Corpus database, including normal and whispered phonation, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method when compared with other modern systems. It is also shown that, combining phase information with magnitude information could significantly improve performance over the common systems solely adopting magnitude information.

Particle swarm optimization based feature enhancement and feature selection for improved emotion recognition in speech and glottal signals.

In the recent years, many research works have been published using speech related features for speech emotion recognition, however, recent studies show that there is a strong correlation between emotional states and glottal features. In this work, Mel-frequency cepstralcoefficients (MFCCs), linear predictive cepstral coefficients (LPCCs), perceptual linear predictive (PLP) features, gammatone filter outputs, timbral texture features, stationary wavelet transform based timbral texture features and relative wavelet packet energy and entropy features were extracted from the emotional speech (ES) signals and its glottal waveforms(GW). Particle swarm optimization based clustering (PSOC) and wrapper based particle swarm optimization (WPSO) were proposed to enhance the discerning ability of the features and to select the discriminating features respectively. Three different emotional speech databases were utilized to gauge the proposed method. Extreme learning machine (ELM) was employed to classify the different types of emotions. Different experiments were conducted and the results show that the proposed method significantly improves the speech emotion recognition performance compared to previous works published in the literature.

Speech Emotion Recognition Using Fourier Parameters

Recently, studies have been performed on harmony features for speech emotion recognition. It is found in our study that the first- and second-order differences of harmony features also play an important role in speech emotion recognition. Therefore, we propose a new Fourier parameter model using the perceptual content of voice quality and the first- and second-order differences for speaker-independent speech emotion recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed Fourier parameter (FP) features are effective in identifying various emotional states in speech signals. They improve the recognition rates over the methods using Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features by 16.2, 6.8 and 16.6 points on the German database (EMODB), Chinese language database (CASIA) and Chinese elderly emotion database (EESDB). In particular, when combining FP with MFCC, the recognition rates can be further improved on the aforementioned databases by 17.5, 10 and 10.5 points, respectively.

Visualization of time-varying joint development of pitch and dynamics for speech emotion recognition

In this paper, we propose a new approach for visualizing the time-varying acoustic features for speech emotion recognition. Although the emotional state does not carry any linguistic information, it is a crucial factor that offers sentiment feedback to the listener. We propose to extract the two most prevalent acoustic features: pitch and dynamics, to identify the speech emotion of the speaker. We represent the time-varying pitch and dynamics as a trajectory in a two-dimensional feature space. Multiple trajectories are then segmented and clustered into signature patterns. This technique was successful in identifying and retargeting expressive musical performance styles. In evaluation, we use the German emotion language database. The database was created with ten professional actors (five males and five females) of ten emotionally unbiased sentences performed in six target emotions (Angry, Happy, Fear, Boredom, Sad, and Disgust). Results showed that the speech samples from the same actor of the same sentence but different emotions have dramatically different trajectory patterns. On the other hand, obvious common patterns were found among low valence emotions like Boredom and Sadness. The current study also opens future research opportunities for applying advanced pattern recognition techniques (e.g., Support Vector Machine and Neural Network) for better emotion identification.