Bi-Feature Selection Deep Learning-Based Techniques for Speech Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition from speech utilizing digital computers has remained a challenging task. Eliciting the salient features that contribute to human emotion from speech signals is vital to human-computer interaction. Many deep learning approaches have been proposed for the recognition of emotion from speech with significant results, however, the combination of deep feature selection approaches on extracted features from speech signals for efficient recognition of emotion with low misclassification demands concrete attention. This paper proposes a deep learning technique using a lightweight efficient deep convolutional neural network to extract features from raw mel-spectrogram and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features from speech signals. Thereafter, two parallel feature selection techniques were utilized on the extracted features, and a fusion strategy was applied, before eventual recognition using two best-performing classifiers. The proposed method was experimented on the TESS dataset, which yielded an accuracy of 99.5% and a specificity value of 98% for recognition of seven classes of emotion. The comparison of the method shows that it outperforms the state-of-the-art approach in pushing speech emotion recognition (SER) performance beyond its current boundaries.