Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion Research Articles

Facial emotion recognition using enhanced multi-verse optimizer method

In recent years, facial emotion recognition has gained significant improvement and attention. This technology utilizes advanced algorithms to analyze facial expressions, enabling computers to detect and interpret human emotions accurately. Its applications span over a wide range of fields, from improving customer service through sentiment analysis, to enhancing mental health support by monitoring emotional states. However, there are several challenges in facial emotion recognition, including variability in individual expressions, cultural differences in emotion display, and privacy concerns related to data collection and usage. Lighting conditions, occlusions, and the need for diverse datasets also impacts accuracy. To solve these issues, an enhanced multi-verse optimizer (EMVO) technique is proposed to improve the efficiency of recognizing emotions. Moreover, EMVO is used to improve the convergence speed, exploration-exploitation balance, solution quality, and the applicability in different types of optimization problems. Two datasets were used to collect the data, namely YouTube and surrey audio-visual expressed emotion (SAVEE) datasets. Then, the classification is done using the convolutional neural networks (CNN) to improve the performance of emotion recognition. When compared to the existing methods shuffled frog leaping algorithm-incremental wrapper-based subset selection (SFLA-IWSS), hierarchical deep neural network (H-DNN) and unique preference learning (UPL), the proposed method achieved better accuracies, measured at 98.65% and 98.76% on the YouTube and SAVEE datasets, respectively.

Acoustic and visual geometry descriptor for multi-modal emotion recognition fromvideos

<span>Recognizing human emotions simultaneously from multiple data modalities (e.g., face, and speech) has drawn significant research interest, and numerous research contributions have been investigated in the affective computing community. However, most methods concentrate less on facial alignment and keyframe selection for audio-visual input. Hence, this paper proposed a new audio-visual descriptor, mainly concentrating on describing the emotion through only a few frames. For this purpose, we proposed a new self-similarity distance matrix (SSDM), which computes the spatial, and temporal distances through landmark points on the facial image. The audio signal is described through an asset of composite features, including statistical features, spectral features, formant frequencies, and energies. A support vector machine (SVM) algorithm is employed to classify both models, and the final results are fused to predict the emotion. Surrey audio-visual expressed emotion (SAVEE) and Ryerson multimedia research lab (RML) datasets are utilized for experimental validation, and the proposed method has shown significant improvement from the state of art methods.</span>

A Feature Selection Algorithm Based on Differential Evolution for English Speech Emotion Recognition

The automatic identification of emotions from speech holds significance in facilitating interactions between humans and machines. To improve the recognition accuracy of speech emotion, we extract mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and pitch features from raw signals, and an improved differential evolution (DE) algorithm is utilized for feature selection based on K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and random forest (RF) classifiers. The proposed multivariate DE (MDE) adopts three mutation strategies to solve the slow convergence of the classical DE and maintain population diversity, and employs a jumping method to avoid falling into local traps. The simulations are conducted on four public English speech emotion datasets: eNTERFACE05, Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS), Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAEE), and Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS), and they cover a diverse range of emotions. The MDE algorithm is compared with PSO-assisted biogeography-based optimization (BBO_PSO), DE, and the sine cosine algorithm (SCA) on emotion recognition error, number of selected features, and running time. From the results obtained, MDE obtains the errors of 0.5270, 0.5044, 0.4490, and 0.0420 in eNTERFACE05, RAVDESS, SAVEE, and TESS based on the KNN classifier, and the errors of 0.4721, 0.4264, 0.3283 and 0.0114 based on the RF classifier. The proposed algorithm demonstrates excellent performance in emotion recognition accuracy, and it finds meaningful acoustic features from MFCCs and pitch.

English Speech Emotion Classification Based on Multi-Objective Differential Evolution

Speech signals involve speakers’ emotional states and language information, which is very important for human–computer interaction that recognizes speakers’ emotions. Feature selection is a common method for improving recognition accuracy. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization method based on differential evolution (MODE-NSF) that maximizes recognition accuracy and minimizes the number of selected features (NSF). First, the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features and pitch features are extracted from speech signals. Then, the proposed algorithm implements feature selection where the NSF guides the initialization, crossover, and mutation of the algorithm. We used four English speech emotion datasets, and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and random forest (RF) classifiers to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results illustrate that MODE-NSF is superior to other multi-objective algorithms in terms of the hypervolume (HV), inverted generational distance (IGD), Pareto optimal solutions, and running time. MODE-NSF achieved an accuracy of 49% using eNTERFACE05, 53% using the Ryerson audio-visual database of emotional speech and song (RAVDESS), 76% using Surrey audio-visual expressed emotion (SAVEE) database, and 98% using the Toronto emotional speech set (TESS). MODE-NSF obtained good recognition results, which provides a basis for the establishment of emotional models.

Speech Emotion Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks with Attention Mechanism

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an interesting and difficult problem to handle. In this paper, we deal with it through the implementation of deep learning networks. We have designed and implemented six different deep learning networks, a deep belief network (DBN), a simple deep neural network (SDNN), an LSTM network (LSTM), an LSTM network with the addition of an attention mechanism (LSTM-ATN), a convolutional neural network (CNN), and a convolutional neural network with the addition of an attention mechanism (CNN-ATN), having in mind, apart from solving the SER problem, to test the impact of the attention mechanism on the results. Dropout and batch normalization techniques are also used to improve the generalization ability (prevention of overfitting) of the models as well as to speed up the training process. The Surrey Audio–Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) database and the Ryerson Audio–Visual Database (RAVDESS) were used for the training and evaluation of our models. The results showed that the networks with the addition of the attention mechanism did better than the others. Furthermore, they showed that the CNN-ATN was the best among the tested networks, achieving an accuracy of 74% for the SAVEE database and 77% for the RAVDESS, and exceeding existing state-of-the-art systems for the same datasets.

Emotional speech-based personality prediction using NPSO architecture in deep learning

Speech is an effective way for analyzing mental and psychological health of a speaker's. Automatic speech recognition has been efficiently investigated for human-computer interaction and understanding the emotional & psychological anatomy of human behavior. Emotions and personality are studied to have a strong link while analyzing the prosodic speech parameters. The work proposes a novel personality and emotion classification model using PSO (particle swarm optimization) based CNN (convolution neural network): (NPSO) that predicts both (emotion and personality) The model is computationally efficient and outperforms language models. Cepstral speech features MFCC (mel frequency cepstral constants) is used to predict emotions with 90% testing accuracy and personality with 91% accuracy on SAVEE(Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion) individually. The correlation between emotion and personality is identified in the work. The experiment uses the four corpora SAVEE, RAVDESS (Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song), CREMAD (Crowd-sourced Emotional Multimodal Actors Dataset, TESS (Toronto emotional speech set) corpus, and the big five personality model for finding associations among emotions and personality traits. Experimental results show that the classification accuracy scores for combined datasets are 74% for emotions and 89% for Personality classifications. The proposed model works on seven emotions and five classes of personality. Results prove that MFCC is enough effective in characterizing and recognizing emotions and personality simultaneously.

Emotion recognition of human speech using deep learning method and MFCC features

Subject matter: Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an ongoing interesting research topic. Its purpose is to establish interactions between humans and computers through speech and emotion. To recognize speech emotions, five deep learning models: Convolution Neural Network, Long-Short Term Memory, Artificial Neural Network, Multi-Layer Perceptron, Merged CNN, and LSTM Network (CNN-LSTM) are used in this paper. The Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS), Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) and Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS) datasets were used for this system. They were trained by merging 3 ways TESS+SAVEE, TESS+RAVDESS, and TESS+SAVEE+RAVDESS. These datasets are numerous audios spoken by both male and female speakers of the English language. This paper classifies seven emotions (sadness, happiness, anger, fear, disgust, neutral, and surprise) that is a challenge to identify seven emotions for both male and female data. Whereas most have worked with male-only or female-only speech and both male-female datasets have found low accuracy in emotion detection tasks. Features need to be extracted by a feature extraction technique to train a deep-learning model on audio data. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) extract all the necessary features from the audio data for speech emotion classification. After training five models with three datasets, the best accuracy of 84.35 % is achieved by CNN-LSTM with the TESS+SAVEE dataset.

Recognition of Emotions in Speech Using Convolutional Neural Networks on Different Datasets

Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models, specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), were applied to extract emotions based on spectrograms and mel-spectrograms. This study uses spectrograms and mel-spectrograms to investigate which feature extraction method better represents emotions and how big the differences in efficiency are in this context. The conducted studies demonstrated that mel-spectrograms are a better-suited data type for training CNN-based speech emotion recognition (SER). The research experiments employed five popular datasets: Crowd-sourced Emotional Multimodal Actors Dataset (CREMA-D), Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS), Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE), Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS), and The Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture (IEMOCAP). Six different classes of emotions were used: happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and neutral. However, some experiments were prepared to recognize just four emotions due to the characteristics of the IEMOCAP dataset. A comparison of classification efficiency on different datasets and an attempt to develop a universal model trained using all datasets were also performed. This approach brought an accuracy of 55.89% when recognizing four emotions. The most accurate model for six emotion recognition was trained and achieved 57.42% accuracy on a combination of four datasets (CREMA-D, RAVDESS, SAVEE, TESS). What is more, another study was developed that demonstrated that improper data division for training and test sets significantly influences the test accuracy of CNNs. Therefore, the problem of inappropriate data division between the training and test sets, which affected the results of studies known from the literature, was addressed extensively. The performed experiments employed the popular ResNet18 architecture to demonstrate the reliability of the research results and to show that these problems are not unique to the custom CNN architecture proposed in experiments. Subsequently, the label correctness of the CREMA-D dataset was studied through the employment of a prepared questionnaire.

A novel spatio-temporal convolutional neural framework for multimodal emotion recognition

Proposing a practical method for high-performance emotion recognition could facilitate human–computer interaction. Among existing methods, deep learning techniques have improved the performance of emotion recognition systems. In this work, a new multimodal neural design is presented wherein audio and visual data are combined as the input to a hybrid network comprised of a bidirectional long short term memory (BiLSTM) network and two convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The spatial and temporal features extracted from video frames are fused with Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and energy features extracted from audio signals and BiLSTM network outputs. Finally, a Softmax classifier is used to classify inputs into the set of target categories. The proposed model is evaluated on Surrey Audio–Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE), Ryerson Audio–Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS), and Ryerson Multimedia research Lab (RML) databases. Experimental results on these datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed model where it achieves the accuracy of 99.75%, 94.99%, and 99.23% for the SAVEE, RAVDESS, and RML databases, respectively. Our experimental study reveals that the suggested method is more effective than existing algorithms in adapting to emotion recognition in these datasets.

A Novel Approach for Detection of Depression Using Speech Analysis by Applying Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

Mental illness has now become more prevalent in the world. Depression is one such illness. As per World Health Organization (WHO), many individuals are likely to put up with depression, and that rate is globally increasing, especially at progressive age. The absence of objective measures and use of traditional techniques are not much effective in predicting mental health of an individual. Hence depression to be usually under-diagnosed but it is also most curable illness. Recent studies have revealed that speech is a sensible indicator of depression syndrome, this giving us an incentive to carry out depression diagnosis by using speech to form an associate degree objective measure. Building on the ideas, a supervised machine learning (ML) model using ensemble is built in identifying whether person is depressed or not by using audio attributes or features of audio datasets. The CNN is being used to train the useful attributes for depression classification from speech. The datasets used for the purpose of model training and testing are taken from Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) and Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS). The features like MFCCs, spectrograms of the audio recordings and related depression criterion are extracted for audio classification using CNN model.

Deep learning based multimodal emotion recognition using model-level fusion of audio–visual modalities

Emotion identification based on multimodal data (e.g., audio, video, text, etc.) is one of the most demanding and important research fields, with various uses. In this context, this research work has conducted a rigorous exploration of model-level fusion to find out the optimal multimodal model for emotion recognition using audio and video modalities. More specifically, separate novel feature extractor networks for audio and video data are proposed. After that, an optimal multimodal emotion recognition model is created by fusing audio and video features at the model level. The performances of the proposed models are assessed based on two benchmark multimodal datasets namely Ryerson Audio–Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS) and Surrey Audio–Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) using various performance metrics. The proposed models achieve high predictive accuracies of 99% and 86% on the SAVEE and RAVDESS datasets, respectively. The effectiveness of the models are also verified by comparing their performances with the existing emotion recognition models. Some case studies are also conducted to explore the model’s ability to capture the variability of emotional states of the speakers in publicly available real-world audio–visual media.

A Novel Classification Method with Cubic Spline Interpolation

Classification is the last, and usually the most time-consuming step in recognition. Most recently proposed classification algorithms have adopted machine learning (ML) as the main classification approach, regardless of time consumption. This study proposes a statistical feature classification cubic spline interpolation (FC-CSI) algorithm to classify emotions in speech using a curve fitting technique. FC-CSI is utilized in a speech emotion recognition system (SERS). The idea is to sketch the cubic spline interpolation (CSI) for each audio file in a dataset and the mean cubic spline interpolations (MCSIs) representing each emotion in the dataset. CSI interpolation is generated by connecting the features extracted from each file in the feature extraction phase. The MCSI is generated by connecting the mean features of 70% of the files of each emotion in the dataset. Points on the CSI are considered the new generated features. To classify each audio file according to emotion, the Euclidian distance (ED) is found between each CSI and all MCSIs of all emotions in the dataset. Each audio file is classified according to the nearest MCSI to the CSI representing it. The three datasets used in this work are Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS), Berlin (Emo-DB), and Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE). The proposed work shows fast classification and high accuracy of results. The classification accuracy, i.e., the proportion of samples assigned to the correct class, using FC-CSI without feature selection (FS), was 69.08%, 92.52%, and 89.1% with RAVDESS, Emo-DB, and SAVEE, respectively. The results of the proposed method were compared to those of a designed neural network called SER-NN. Comparisons were made with and without FS. FC-CSI outperformed SER-NN on Emo-DB and SAVEE, and underperformed on RAVDESS, without using an FS algorithm. It was noticed from experiments that FC-CSI operated faster than the same system utilizing SER-NN.

A Novel S-LDA Features for Automatic Emotion Recognition from Speech using 1-D CNN

Emotions are explicit and serious mental activities, which find expression in speech, body gestures and facial features, etc. Speech is a fast, effective and the most convenient mode of human communication. Hence, speech has become the most researched modality in Automatic Emotion Recognition (AER). To extract the most discriminative and robust features from speech for Automatic Emotion Recognition (AER) recognition has yet remained a challenge. This paper, proposes a new algorithm named Shifted Linear Discriminant Analysis (S-LDA) to extract modified features from static low-level features like Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Pitch. Further 1-D Convolution Neural Network (CNN) was applied to these modified features for extracting high-level features for AER. The performance evaluation of classification task for the proposed techniques has been carried out on the three standard databases: Berlin EMO-DB emotional speech database, Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) database and eNTERFACE database. The proposed technique has shown to outperform the results obtained using state of the art techniques. The results shows that the best accuracy obtained for AER using the eNTERFACE database is 86.41%, on the Berlin database is 99.59% and with SAVEE database is 99.57%.

The Effect of the Number of Key-Frames on the Facial Emotion Recognition Accuracy

Key-frame selection plays an important role in facial expression recognition systems. It helps in selecting the most representative frames that capture the different poses of the face. The effect of the number of selected keyframes has been studied in this paper to find its impact on the final accuracy of the emotion recognition system. Dynamic and static information is employed to select the most effective key-frames of the facial video with a short response time. Firstly, the absolute difference between the successive frames is used to reduce the number of frames and select the candidate ones which then contribute to the clustering process. The static-based information of the reduced sets of frames is then given to the fuzzy C-Means algorithm to select the best C-frames. The selected keyframes are then fed to a graph mining-based facial emotion recognition system to select the most effective sub-graphs in the given set of keyframes. Different experiments have been conducted using Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) database and the results show that the proposed method can effectively capture the keyframes that give the best accuracy with a mean response time equals to 2.89s.

Impact of Feature Selection Algorithm on Speech Emotion Recognition Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) plays a significant role in human–machine interaction. Emotion recognition from speech and its precise classification is a challenging task because a machine is unable to understand its context. For an accurate emotion classification, emotionally relevant features must be extracted from the speech data. Traditionally, handcrafted features were used for emotional classification from speech signals; however, they are not efficient enough to accurately depict the emotional states of the speaker. In this study, the benefits of a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for SER are explored. For this purpose, a pretrained network is used to extract features from state-of-the-art speech emotional datasets. Subsequently, a correlation-based feature selection technique is applied to the extracted features to select the most appropriate and discriminative features for SER. For the classification of emotions, we utilize support vector machines, random forests, the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, and neural network classifiers. Experiments are performed for speaker-dependent and speaker-independent SER using four publicly available datasets: the Berlin Dataset of Emotional Speech (Emo-DB), Surrey Audio Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE), Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture (IEMOCAP), and the Ryerson Audio Visual Dataset of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS). Our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 95.10% for Emo-DB, 82.10% for SAVEE, 83.80% for IEMOCAP, and 81.30% for RAVDESS, for speaker-dependent SER experiments. Moreover, our method yields the best results for speaker-independent SER with existing handcrafted features-based SER approaches.

Fusing Visual Attention CNN and Bag of Visual Words for Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) classifies emotions using low-level features or a spectrogram of an utterance. When SER methods are trained and tested using different datasets, they have shown performance reduction. Cross-corpus SER research identifies speech emotion using different corpora and languages. Recent cross-corpus SER research has been conducted to improve generalization. To improve the cross-corpus SER performance, we pretrained the log-mel spectrograms of the source dataset using our designed visual attention convolutional neural network (VACNN), which has a 2D CNN base model with channel- and spatial-wise visual attention modules. To train the target dataset, we extracted the feature vector using a bag of visual words (BOVW) to assist the fine-tuned model. Because visual words represent local features in the image, the BOVW helps VACNN to learn global and local features in the log-mel spectrogram by constructing a frequency histogram of visual words. The proposed method shows an overall accuracy of 83.33%, 86.92%, and 75.00% in the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS), the Berlin Database of Emotional Speech (EmoDB), and Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE), respectively. Experimental results on RAVDESS, EmoDB, SAVEE demonstrate improvements of 7.73%, 15.12%, and 2.34% compared to existing state-of-the-art cross-corpus SER approaches.

Emotion Recognition Based on Mining Sub-Graphs of Facial Components

Facial emotion recognition finds many real applications in the daily life like human robot interaction, eLearning, healthcare, customer services etc. The task of facial emotion recognition is not easy due to the difficulty in determining the effective feature set that can recognize the emotion conveyed within the facial expression accurately. Graph mining techniques are exploited in this paper to solve facial emotion recognition problem. After determining positions of facial landmarks in face region, twelve different graphs are constructed using four facial components to serve as a source for sub-graphs mining stage using gSpan algorithm. In each group, the discriminative set of sub-graphs are selected and fed to Deep Belief Network (DBN) for classification purpose. The results obtained from the different groups are then fused using Naïve Bayes classifier to make the final decision regards the emotion class. Different tests were performed using Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) database and the achieved results showed that the system gives the desired accuracy (100%) when fusion decisions of the facial groups. The achieved result outperforms state-of-the-art results on the same database.

Speech emotion recognition using hybrid spectral-prosodic features of speech signal/glottal waveform, metaheuristic-based dimensionality reduction, and Gaussian elliptical basis function network classifier

In this paper, a hybrid system consisting of three stages of feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and feature classification is proposed for speech emotion recognition (SER). At feature extraction stage, an informationally-rich spectral-prosodic hybrid feature vector comprised of perceptual-spectral features; that is, mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), perceptual linear prediction coefficient (PLPC), and perceptual minimum variance distortionless response (PMVDR) coefficient along with the prosodic feature of pitch (i.e. F0) are extracted for each frame. This feature vector is extracted from both speech signal and its glottal-waveform. The first and the second-order derivatives are then added to the above-mentioned vector to form a high-dimensional hybrid feature vector characterized by a large number of dimensions. At the next stage, i.e. dimensionality reduction, the dimensionality of this feature vector is reduced using a new proposed quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO)-based approach. In this paper, a new QPSO algorithm (so-called, pQPSO) is presented that makes use of a truncated Laplace distribution (TLD) to generate new particles and thus to produce solutions (i.e. particles) that are all within a valid range of a problem (contrary to the standard QPSO). The contraction-expansion (CE) factor of the proposed pQPSO is also selected adaptively. Using the proposed QPSO algorithm, an optimal discriminative dimensionality reduction matrix (i.e. projection matrix) is estimated with emotion classification accuracy as a class-discriminative criterion. At the subsequent stage, vectors with reduced feature dimensionality are fed into a Gaussian elliptical basis function (GEBF)-type neural network classifier to detect their speech emotion. To accelerate the training phase of the GEBF classifier, a fast-scaled conjugate gradient (SCG) algorithm is correspondingly employed that does not need to adjust the learning rate. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated on three standard emotional speech databases of Berlin Database of Emotional Speech (EMODB), Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE), and Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture (IEMOCAP). The experimental results showed that the proposed method was more accurate than state-of-the-art ones in terms of detecting speech emotions.

A novel facial emotion recognition scheme based on graph mining

Recent years have seen an explosion in graph data from a variety of scientific, social and technological fields. From these fields, emotion recognition is an interesting research area because it finds many applications in real life such as in effective social robotics to increase the interactivity of the robot with human, driver safety during driving, pain monitoring during surgery etc. A novel facial emotion recognition based on graph mining has been proposed in this paper to make a paradigm shift in the way of representing the face region, where the face region is represented as a graph of nodes and edges and the gSpan frequent sub-graphs mining algorithm is used to find the frequent sub-structures in the graph database of each emotion. To reduce the number of generated sub-graphs, overlap ratio metric is utilized for this purpose. After encoding the final selected sub-graphs, binary classification is then applied to classify the emotion of the queried input facial image using six levels of classification. Binary cat swarm intelligence is applied within each level of classification to select proper sub-graphs that give the highest accuracy in that level. Different experiments have been conducted using Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) database and the final system accuracy was 90.00%. The results show significant accuracy improvements (about 2%) by the proposed system in comparison to current published works in SAVEE database.

Speech emotion recognition using discriminative dimension reduction by employing a modified quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization algorithm

In recent years, Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has received considerable attention in affective computing field. In this paper, an improved system for SER is proposed. In the feature extraction step, a hybrid high-dimensional rich feature vector is extracted from both speech signal and glottal-waveform signal using techniques such as MFCC, PLPC, and MVDR. The prosodic features derived from fundamental frequency (f0) contour are also added to this feature vector. The proposed system is based on a holistic approach that employs a modified quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) algorithm (called pQPSO) to estimate both the optimal projection matrix for feature-vector dimension reduction and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classifier parameters. Since the problem parameters are in a limited range and the standard QPSO algorithm performs a search in an infinite range, in this paper, the QPSO is modified in such a way that it uses a truncated probability distribution and makes the search more efficient. The system works in real-time and is evaluated on three standard emotional speech databases Berlin database of emotional speech (EMO-DB), Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) and Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture (IEMOCAP). The proposed method improves the accuracy of the SER system compared to classical methods such as FA, PCA, PPCA, LDA, standard QPSO, wQPSO, and deep neural network, and also outperforms many state-of-the-art recent approaches that use the same datasets.