A modified feature selection method based on metaheuristic algorithms for speech emotion recognition

Feature selection plays an important role to build a successful speech emotion recognition system. In this paper, a feature selection approach which modifies the initial population generation stage of metaheuristic search algorithms, is proposed. The approach is evaluated on two metaheuristic search algorithms, a nondominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) and Cuckoo Search in the context of speech emotion recognition using Berlin emotional speech database (EMO-DB) and Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture (IEMOCAP) database. Results show that the presented feature selection algorithms reduce the number of features significantly and are still effective for emotion classification from speech. Specifically, in speaker-dependent experiments of the EMO-DB, recognition rates of 87.66% and 87.20% are obtained using selected features by modified Cuckoo Search and NSGA-II respectively, whereas, for the IEMOCAP database, the accuracies of 69.30% and 68.32% are obtained using SVM classifier. For the speaker-independent experiments, we achieved comparable results for both databases. Specifically, recognition rates of 76.80% and 76.82% for EMO-DB and 59.37% and 59.52% for IEMOCAP using modified NSGA-II and Cuckoo Search respectively. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.