Speech emotion recognition using machine learning techniques: Feature extraction and comparison of convolutional neural network and random forest

Abstract

Speech is a direct and rich way of transmitting information and emotions from one point to another. In this study, we aimed to classify different emotions in speech using various audio features and machine learning models. We extracted various types of audio features such as Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, chromogram, Mel-scale spectrogram, spectral contrast feature, Tonnetz representation and zero-crossing rate. We used a limited dataset of speech emotion recognition (SER) and augmented it with additional audios. In addition, In contrast to many previous studies, we combined all audio files together before conducting our analysis. We compared the performance of two models: one-dimensional convolutional neural network (conv1D) and random forest (RF), with RF-based feature selection. Our results showed that RF with feature selection achieved higher average accuracy (69%) than conv1D and had the highest precision for fear (72%) and the highest recall for calm (84%). Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of RF with feature selection for speech emotion classification using a limited dataset. We found for both algorithms, anger is misclassified mostly with happy, disgust with sad and neutral, and fear with sad. This could be due to the similarity of some acoustic features between these emotions, such as pitch, intensity, and tempo.