Emotion Recognition Based on Speech Signals by Combining Empirical Mode Decomposition and Deep Neural Network

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method for speech emotion recognition. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is applied in this paper for the extraction of emotional features from speeches, and a deep neural network (DNN) is used to classify speech emotions. This paper enhances the emotional components in speech signals by using EMD with acoustic feature Mel-Scale Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) to improve the recognition rates of emotions from speeches using the classifier DNN. In this paper, EMD is first used to decompose the speech signals, which contain emotional components into multiple intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and then emotional features are derived from the IMFs and are calculated using MFCC. Then, the emotional features are used to train the DNN model. Finally, a trained model that could recognize the emotional signals is then used to identify emotions in speeches. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method is effective.