Speech Emotion Recognition Using 2D-CNN with Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients

With the advent of context-aware computing, many attempts were made to understand emotions. Among these various attempts, Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is a method of recognizing the speaker's emotions through speech information. The SER is successful in selecting distinctive 'features' and 'classifying' them in an appropriate way. In this paper, the performances of SER using neural network models (e.g., fully connected network (FCN), convolutional neural network (CNN)) with Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are examined in terms of the accuracy and distribution of emotion recognition. For Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS) dataset, by tuning model parameters, a two-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (2D-CNN) model with MFCC showed the best performance with an average accuracy of 88.54% for 5 emotions, anger, happiness, calm, fear, and sadness, of men and women. In addition, by examining the distribution of emotion recognition accuracies for neural network models, the 2D-CNN with MFCC can expect an overall accuracy of 75% or more.