A system for recognizing human emotions based on speech analysis and facial feature extraction: applications to Human-Robot Interaction

With the advance in Artificial Intelligence, humanoid robots start to interact with ordinary people based on the growing understanding of psychological processes. Accumulating evidences in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) suggest that researches are focusing on making an emotional communication between human and robot for creating a social perception, cognition, desired interaction and sensation. Furthermore, robots need to receive human emotion and optimize their behavior to help and interact with a human being in various environments. The most natural way to recognize basic emotions is extracting sets of features from human speech, facial expression and body gesture. A system for recognition of emotions based on speech analysis and facial features extraction can have interesting applications in Human-Robot Interaction. Thus, the Human-Robot Interaction ontology explains how the knowledge of these fundamental sciences is applied in physics (sound analyses), mathematics (face detection and perception), philosophy theory (behavior) and robotic science context. In this project, we carry out a study to recognize basic emotions (sadness, surprise, happiness, anger, fear and disgust). Also, we propose a methodology and a software program for classification of emotions based on speech analysis and facial features extraction. The speech analysis phase attempted to investigate the appropriateness of using acoustic (pitch value, pitch peak, pitch range, intensity and formant), phonetic (speech rate) properties of emotive speech with the freeware program PRAAT, and consists of generating and analyzing a graph of speech signals. The proposed architecture investigated the appropriateness of analyzing emotive speech with the minimal use of signal processing algorithms. 30 participants to the experiment had to repeat five sentences in English (with durations typically between 0.40 s and 2.5 s) in order to extract data relative to pitch (value, range and peak) and rising-falling intonation. Pitch alignments (peak, value and range) have been evaluated and the results have been compared with intensity and speech rate. The facial feature extraction phase uses the mathematical formulation (B\ue9zier curves) and the geometric analysis of the facial image, based on measurements of a set of Action Units (AUs) for classifying the emotion. The proposed technique consists of three steps: (i) detecting the facial region within the image, (ii) extracting and classifying the facial features, (iii) recognizing the emotion. Then, the new data have been merged with reference data in order to recognize the basic emotion. Finally, we combined the two proposed algorithms (speech analysis and facial expression), in order to design a hybrid technique for emotion recognition. Such technique have been implemented in a software program, which can be employed in Human-Robot Interaction. The efficiency of the methodology was evaluated by experimental tests on 30 individuals (15 female and 15 male, 20 to 48 years old) form different ethnic groups, namely: (i) Ten adult European, (ii) Ten Asian (Middle East) adult and (iii) Ten adult American. Eventually, the proposed technique made possible to recognize the basic emotion in most of the cases

Final Report to NSF of the Standards for Facial Animation Workshop

The human face is an important and complex communication channel. It is a very familiar and sensitive object of human perception. The facial animation field has increased greatly in the past few years as fast computer graphics workstations have made the modeling and real-time animation of hundreds of thousands of polygons affordable and almost commonplace. Many applications have been developed such as teleconferencing, surgery, information assistance systems, games, and entertainment. To solve these different problems, different approaches for both animation control and modeling have been developed

Multi-Sensory Emotion Recognition with Speech and Facial Expression

Emotion plays an important role in human beings’ daily lives. Understanding emotions and recognizing how to react to others’ feelings are fundamental to engaging in successful social interactions. Currently, emotion recognition is not only significant in human beings’ daily lives, but also a hot topic in academic research, as new techniques such as emotion recognition from speech context inspires us as to how emotions are related to the content we are uttering. The demand and importance of emotion recognition have highly increased in many applications in recent years, such as video games, human computer interaction, cognitive computing, and affective computing. Emotion recognition can be done from many sources including text, speech, hand, and body gesture as well as facial expression. Presently, most of the emotion recognition methods only use one of these sources. The emotion of human beings changes every second and using a single way to process the emotion recognition may not reflect the emotion correctly. This research is motivated by the desire to understand and evaluate human beings’ emotion from multiple ways such as speech and facial expressions. In this dissertation, multi-sensory emotion recognition has been exploited. The proposed framework can recognize emotion from speech, facial expression, and both of them. There are three important parts in the design of the system: the facial emotion recognizer, the speech emotion recognizer, and the information fusion. The information fusion part uses the results from the speech emotion recognition and facial emotion recognition. Then, a novel weighted method is used to integrate the results, and a final decision of the emotion is given after the fusion. The experiments show that with the weighted fusion methods, the accuracy can be improved to an average of 3.66% compared to fusion without adding weight. The improvement of the recognition rate can reach 18.27% and 5.66% compared to the speech emotion recognition and facial expression recognition, respectively. By improving the emotion recognition accuracy, the proposed multi-sensory emotion recognition system can help to improve the naturalness of human computer interaction

Multi-Sensory Emotion Recognition with Speech and Facial Expression

Emotion plays an important role in human beings’ daily lives. Understanding emotions and recognizing how to react to others’ feelings are fundamental to engaging in successful social interactions. Currently, emotion recognition is not only significant in human beings’ daily lives, but also a hot topic in academic research, as new techniques such as emotion recognition from speech context inspires us as to how emotions are related to the content we are uttering. The demand and importance of emotion recognition have highly increased in many applications in recent years, such as video games, human computer interaction, cognitive computing, and affective computing. Emotion recognition can be done from many sources including text, speech, hand, and body gesture as well as facial expression. Presently, most of the emotion recognition methods only use one of these sources. The emotion of human beings changes every second and using a single way to process the emotion recognition may not reflect the emotion correctly. This research is motivated by the desire to understand and evaluate human beings’ emotion from multiple ways such as speech and facial expressions. In this dissertation, multi-sensory emotion recognition has been exploited. The proposed framework can recognize emotion from speech, facial expression, and both of them. There are three important parts in the design of the system: the facial emotion recognizer, the speech emotion recognizer, and the information fusion. The information fusion part uses the results from the speech emotion recognition and facial emotion recognition. Then, a novel weighted method is used to integrate the results, and a final decision of the emotion is given after the fusion. The experiments show that with the weighted fusion methods, the accuracy can be improved to an average of 3.66% compared to fusion without adding weight. The improvement of the recognition rate can reach 18.27% and 5.66% compared to the speech emotion recognition and facial expression recognition, respectively. By improving the emotion recognition accuracy, the proposed multi-sensory emotion recognition system can help to improve the naturalness of human computer interaction