Voice Feature Extraction for Gender and Emotion Recognition

Voice recognition plays a key role in spoken communication that helps to identify the emotions of a person that reflects in the voice. Gender classification through speech is a widely used Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as it is not easy to identify gender by computer. This led to the development of a model for “Voice feature extraction for Emotion and Gender Recognition”. The speech signal consists of semantic information, speaker information (gender, age, emotional state), accompanied by noise. Females and males have different voice characteristics due to their acoustical and perceptual differences along with a variety of emotions which convey their own unique perceptions. In order to explore this area, feature extraction requires pre- processing of data, which is necessary for increasing the accuracy. The proposed model follows steps such as data extraction, pre- processing using Voice Activity Detector (VAD), feature extraction using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC), feature reduction by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The proposed combination of techniques produced better results which can be useful in the healthcare sector, virtual assistants, security purposes and other fields related to the Human Machine Interaction domain.&nbsp

Multimodal Approach for Emotion Recognition Using a Formal Computational Model

International audience— Emotions play a crucial role in human-computer interaction. They are generally expressed and perceived through multiple modalities such as speech, facial expressions, physiological signals. Indeed, the complexity of emotions makes the acquisition very difficult and makes unimodal systems (i.e., the observation of only one source of emotion) unreliable and often unfeasible in applications of high complexity. Moreover the lack of a standard in human emotions modeling hinders the sharing of affective information between applications. In this paper, we present a multimodal approach for the emotion recognition from many sources of information. This paper aims to provide a multi-modal system for emotion recognition and exchange that will facilitate inter-systems exchanges and improve the credibility of emotional interaction between users and computers. We elaborate a multimodal emotion recognition method from Physiological Data based on signal processing algorithms. Our method permits to recognize emotion composed of several aspects like simulated and masked emotions. This method uses a new multidimensional model to represent emotional states based on an algebraic representation. The experimental results show that the proposed multimodal emotion recognition method improves the recognition rates in comparison to the unimodal approach. Compared to the state of art multimodal techniques, the proposed method gives a good results with 72% of correct

Machine Learning for Interactive Systems: Challenges and Future Trends

National audienceMachine learning has been introduced more than 40 years ago in interactive systems through speech recognition or computer vision. Since that, machine learning gained in interest in the scientific community involved in human- machine interaction and raised in the abstraction scale. It moved from fundamental signal processing to language understanding and generation, emotion and mood recogni- tion and even dialogue management or robotics control. So far, existing machine learning techniques have often been considered as a solution to some problems raised by inter- active systems. Yet, interaction is also the source of new challenges for machine learning and offers new interesting practical but also theoretical problems to solve. In this paper, we address these challenges and describe why research in machine learning and interactive systems should converge in the future

Biometrics for Emotion Detection (BED): Exploring the combination of Speech and ECG

The paradigm Biometrics for Emotion Detection (BED) is introduced, which enables unobtrusive emotion recognition, taking into account varying environments. It uses the electrocardiogram (ECG) and speech, as a powerful but rarely used combination to unravel people’s emotions. BED was applied in two environments (i.e., office and home-like) in which 40 people watched 6 film scenes. It is shown that both heart rate variability (derived from the ECG) and, when people’s gender is taken into account, the standard deviation of the fundamental frequency of speech indicate people’s experienced emotions. As such, these measures validate each other. Moreover, it is found that people’s environment can indeed of influence experienced emotions. These results indicate that BED might become an important paradigm for unobtrusive emotion detection

Affective Medicine: a review of Affective Computing efforts in Medical Informatics

Background: Affective computing (AC) is concerned with emotional interactions performed with and through computers. It is defined as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions”. AC enables investigation and understanding of the relation between human emotions and health as well as application of assistive and useful technologies in the medical domain. Objectives: 1) To review the general state of the art in AC and its applications in medicine, and 2) to establish synergies between the research communities of AC and medical informatics. Methods: Aspects related to the human affective state as a determinant of the human health are discussed, coupled with an illustration of significant AC research and related literature output. Moreover, affective communication channels are described and their range of application fields is explored through illustrative examples. Results: The presented conferences, European research projects and research publications illustrate the recent increase of interest in the AC area by the medical community. Tele-home healthcare, AmI, ubiquitous monitoring, e-learning and virtual communities with emotionally expressive characters for elderly or impaired people are few areas where the potential of AC has been realized and applications have emerged. Conclusions: A number of gaps can potentially be overcome through the synergy of AC and medical informatics. The application of AC technologies parallels the advancement of the existing state of the art and the introduction of new methods. The amount of work and projects reviewed in this paper witness an ambitious and optimistic synergetic future of the affective medicine field

Affective games:a multimodal classification system

Affective gaming is a relatively new field of research that exploits human emotions to influence gameplay for an enhanced player experience. Changes in player’s psychology reflect on their behaviour and physiology, hence recognition of such variation is a core element in affective games. Complementary sources of affect offer more reliable recognition, especially in contexts where one modality is partial or unavailable. As a multimodal recognition system, affect-aware games are subject to the practical difficulties met by traditional trained classifiers. In addition, inherited game-related challenges in terms of data collection and performance arise while attempting to sustain an acceptable level of immersion. Most existing scenarios employ sensors that offer limited freedom of movement resulting in less realistic experiences. Recent advances now offer technology that allows players to communicate more freely and naturally with the game, and furthermore, control it without the use of input devices. However, the affective game industry is still in its infancy and definitely needs to catch up with the current life-like level of adaptation provided by graphics and animation

Ubiquitous emotion-aware computing

Emotions are a crucial element for personal and ubiquitous computing. What to sense and how to sense it, however, remain a challenge. This study explores the rare combination of speech, electrocardiogram, and a revised Self-Assessment Mannequin to assess people’s emotions. 40 people watched 30 International Affective Picture System pictures in either an office or a living-room environment. Additionally, their personality traits neuroticism and extroversion and demographic information (i.e., gender, nationality, and level of education) were recorded. The resulting data were analyzed using both basic emotion categories and the valence--arousal model, which enabled a comparison between both representations. The combination of heart rate variability and three speech measures (i.e., variability of the fundamental frequency of pitch (F0), intensity, and energy) explained 90% (p < .001) of the participants’ experienced valence--arousal, with 88% for valence and 99% for arousal (ps < .001). The six basic emotions could also be discriminated (p < .001), although the explained variance was much lower: 18–20%. Environment (or context), the personality trait neuroticism, and gender proved to be useful when a nuanced assessment of people’s emotions was needed. Taken together, this study provides a significant leap toward robust, generic, and ubiquitous emotion-aware computing