3D CNN-Based Speech Emotion Recognition Using K-Means Clustering and Spectrograms

Detecting human intentions and emotions helps improve human-robot interactions. Emotion recognition has been a challenging research direction in the past decade. This paper proposes an emotion recognition system based on analysis of speech signals. Firstly, we split each speech signal into overlapping frames of the same length. Next, we extract an 88-dimensional vector of audio features including Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), pitch, and intensity for each of the respective frames. In parallel, the spectrogram of each frame is generated. In the final preprocessing step, by applying k-means clustering on the extracted features of all frames of each audio signal, we select k most discriminant frames, namely keyframes, to summarize the speech signal. Then, the sequence of the corresponding spectrograms of keyframes is encapsulated in a 3D tensor. These tensors are used to train and test a 3D Convolutional Neural network using a 10-fold cross-validation approach. The proposed 3D CNN has two convolutional layers and one fully connected layer. Experiments are conducted on the Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE), Ryerson Multimedia Laboratory (RML), and eNTERFACE'05 databases. The results are superior to the state-of-the-art methods reported in the literature.