Frontal EEG correlation based human emotion identification and classification

Humans express their feelings and intentions of their actions or communication through emotions. Recent advancements in technology involve machines in human communication in day-to-day life. Thus, understanding of human emotions by machines will be very helpful in assisting the user in a far better way. Various physiological and non-physiological signals can be used to make the machines to recognize the emotion of a person. The identification of emotional content in the signals is crucial to understand emotion and the machines act with emotional intelligence at appropriate times, thus providing a better human machine interaction with emotion identification system and mental health monitoring for psychiatric patients. This work includes the creation of an emotion EEG dataset, the development of an algorithm for identifying the emotion elicitation segments in the EEG signal, and the classification of emotions from EEG signals. The EEG signals are divided into 3s segments, and the segments with emotional content are selected based on the decrease in correlation between the frontal electrodes. The selected segments are validated with the facial expressions of the subjects in the appropriate time segments of the face video. EEGNet is used to classify the emotion from the EEG signal. The classification accuracy with the selected emotional EEG segments is higher compared to the accuracy using all the EEG segments. In subject-specific classification, an average accuracy of 80.87% is obtained from the network trained with selected EEG segments, and 70.5% is obtained from training with all EEG segments. In subject-independent classification, the accuracy of classification is 67% and 63.8% with and without segment selection, respectively. The proposed method of selection of EEG segments is validated using the DEAP dataset, and classification accuracies and F1-scores of subject dependent and subject-independent methods are presented.