A hierarchical approach with feature selection for emotion recognition from speech

Abstract

We examine speaker independent emotion classification from speech, reporting experiments on the Berlin database across six basic emotions. Our approach is novel in a number of ways: First, it is hierarchical, motivated by our belief that the most suitable feature set for classification is different for each pair of emotions. Further, it uses a large number of feature sets of different types, such as prosodic, spectral, glottal flow based, and AM-FM ones. Finally, it employs a two-stage feature selection strategy to achieve discriminative dimensionality reduction. The approach results to a classification rate of 85%, comparable to the state-of-the-art on this dataset.

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