Speech emotion classification using fractal dimension-based features

Abstract

During the last 10–20 years, a great deal of new ideas have been proposed to improve the accuracy of speech emotion recognition: e.g., effective feature sets, complex classification schemes, and multi-modal data acquisition. Nevertheless, speech emotion recognition is still the task in limited success. Considering the nonlinear and fluctuating nature of the emotional speech, in this paper, we present fractal dimension-based features for speech emotion classification. We employed Katz, Castiglioni, Higuchi, and Hurst exponent-based features and their statistical functionals to establish the 224-dimensional full feature set. The dimension was downsized by applying the Sequential Forward Selection technique. The results of experimental study show a clear superiority of fractal dimension-based feature sets against the acoustic ones. The average accuracy of 96.5% was obtained using the reduced feature sets. The feature selection enabled us to obtain the 4-dimensional and 8-dimensional sets for Lithuanian and German emotions, respectively.