Gender Identification in a Two-Level Hierarchical Speech Emotion Recognition System for an Italian Social Robot

The real challenge in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is to build machines capable of perceiving human emotions so that robots can interact with humans in a proper manner. Emotion varies accordingly to many factors, and gender represents one of the most influential ones: an appropriate gender-dependent emotion recognition system is recommended indeed. In this article, we propose a Gender Recognition (GR) module for the gender identification of the speaker, as a preliminary step for the final development of a Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) system. The system was designed to be installed on social robots for hospitalized and living at home patients monitoring. Hence, the importance of reducing the software computational effort of the architecture also minimizing the hardware bulkiness, in order for the system to be suitable for social robots. The algorithm was executed on the Raspberry Pi hardware. For the training, the Italian emotional database EMOVO was used. Results show a GR accuracy value of 97.8%, comparable with the ones found in the literature.