Speech Emotion Recognition Based on Gender Influence in Emotional Expression

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-40
Author(s):  
P Vasuki ◽  
Divya Bharati R

The real challenge in human-computer interaction is understanding human emotions by machines and responding to it accordingly. Emotion varies by gender and age of the speaker, location, and cause. This article focuses on the improvement of emotion recognition (ER) from speech using gender-biased influences in emotional expression. The problem is addressed by testing emotional speech with an appropriate specific-gender ER system. As acoustical characteristics vary among the genders, there may not be a common optimal feature set across both genders. Gender-based speech emotion recognition, a two-level hierarchical ER system is proposed, where the first level is gender identification which identifies the gender, and the second level is a gender-specific ER system, trained with an optimal feature set of expressions of a particular gender. The proposed system increases the accuracy of traditional Speech Emotion Recognition Systems (SER) by 10.36% than the SER trained with mixed gender training when tested on the EMO-DB Corpus.

Author(s):  
Antonio Guerrieri ◽  
Eleonora Braccili ◽  
Federica Sgrò ◽  
Giulio Meldolesi

The real challenge in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is to build machines capable of perceiving human emotions so that robots can interact with humans in a proper manner. It is well known from the literature that emotion varies accordingly to many factors. Among these, gender represents one of the most influencing one, and so an appropriate gender-dependent emotion recognition system is recommended. In this paper, a two-level hierarchical Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) system is proposed: the first level is represented by the Gender Recognition (GR) module for the speaker’s gender identification; the second is a gender-specific SER block. Specifically for this work, the attention was focused on the optimisation of the first level of the proposed architecture. The system was designed to be installed on social robots for hospitalised and living at home elderly patients monitoring. Hence, the importance of reducing the software computational effort of the architecture also minimizing the hardware bulkiness, in order for the system to be suitable for social robots. The algorithm was executed on the Raspberry Pi hardware. For the training, the Italian emotional database EMOVO was used. Results show a GR accuracy value of 97.8%, comparable with the ones found in literature.


2013 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Dittrich ◽  
Gregor Domes ◽  
Susi Loebel ◽  
Christoph Berger ◽  
Carsten Spitzer ◽  
...  

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Hypothese eines mit Alexithymie assoziierten Defizits beim Erkennen emotionaler Gesichtsaudrücke an einer klinischen Population. Darüber hinaus werden Hypothesen zur Bedeutung spezifischer Emotionsqualitäten sowie zu Gender-Unterschieden getestet. 68 ambulante und stationäre psychiatrische Patienten (44 Frauen und 24 Männer) wurden mit der Toronto-Alexithymie-Skala (TAS-20), der Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Scale (MADRS), der Symptom-Check-List (SCL-90-R) und der Emotional Expression Multimorph Task (EEMT) untersucht. Als Stimuli des Gesichtererkennungsparadigmas dienten Gesichtsausdrücke von Basisemotionen nach Ekman und Friesen, die zu Sequenzen mit sich graduell steigernder Ausdrucksstärke angeordnet waren. Mittels multipler Regressionsanalyse untersuchten wir die Assoziation von TAS-20 Punktzahl und facial emotion recognition (FER). Während sich für die Gesamtstichprobe und den männlichen Stichprobenteil kein signifikanter Zusammenhang zwischen TAS-20-Punktzahl und FER zeigte, sahen wir im weiblichen Stichprobenteil durch die TAS-20 Punktzahl eine signifikante Prädiktion der Gesamtfehlerzahl (β = .38, t = 2.055, p < 0.05) und den Fehlern im Erkennen der Emotionen Wut und Ekel (Wut: β = .40, t = 2.240, p < 0.05, Ekel: β = .41, t = 2.214, p < 0.05). Für wütende Gesichter betrug die Varianzaufklärung durch die TAS-20-Punktzahl 13.3 %, für angeekelte Gesichter 19.7 %. Kein Zusammenhang bestand zwischen der Zeit, nach der die Probanden die emotionalen Sequenzen stoppten, um ihre Bewertung abzugeben (Antwortlatenz) und Alexithymie. Die Ergebnisse der Arbeit unterstützen das Vorliegen eines mit Alexithymie assoziierten Defizits im Erkennen emotionaler Gesichtsausdrücke bei weiblchen Probanden in einer heterogenen, klinischen Stichprobe. Dieses Defizit könnte die Schwierigkeiten Hochalexithymer im Bereich sozialer Interaktionen zumindest teilweise begründen und so eine Prädisposition für psychische sowie psychosomatische Erkrankungen erklären.


2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingjie Yan ◽  
Xiaolan Wang ◽  
Weiyi Gu ◽  
LiLi Ma

Abstract Speech emotion recognition is deemed to be a meaningful and intractable issue among a number of do- mains comprising sentiment analysis, computer science, pedagogy, and so on. In this study, we investigate speech emotion recognition based on sparse partial least squares regression (SPLSR) approach in depth. We make use of the sparse partial least squares regression method to implement the feature selection and dimensionality reduction on the whole acquired speech emotion features. By the means of exploiting the SPLSR method, the component parts of those redundant and meaningless speech emotion features are lessened to zero while those serviceable and informative speech emotion features are maintained and selected to the following classification step. A number of tests on Berlin database reveal that the recogni- tion rate of the SPLSR method can reach up to 79.23% and is superior to other compared dimensionality reduction methods.


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