Affiliations: ICT and Society Research Group, South Africa Luban Workshop, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Kudakwashe Zvarevashe, ICT and Society Research Group, South Africa Luban Workshop, Durban University of Technology, Durban 4000, South Africa. E-mail: kudakwashe.zvarevashe@gmail.com.
Abstract: Speech emotion recognition has become the heart of most human computer interaction applications in the modern world. The growing need to develop emotionally intelligent devices has opened up a lot of research opportunities. Most researchers in this field have applied the use of handcrafted features and machine learning techniques in recognising speech emotion. However, these techniques require extra processing steps and handcrafted features are usually not robust. They are computationally intensive because the curse of dimensionality results in low discriminating power. Research has shown that deep learning algorithms are effective for extracting robust and salient features in dataset. In this study, we have developed a custom 2D-convolution neural network that performs both feature extraction and classification of vocal utterances. The neural network has been evaluated against deep multilayer perceptron neural network and deep radial basis function neural network using the Berlin database of emotional speech, Ryerson audio-visual emotional speech database and Surrey audio-visual expressed emotion corpus. The described deep learning algorithm achieves the highest precision, recall and F1-scores when compared to other existing algorithms. It is observed that there may be need to develop customized solutions for different language settings depending on the area of applications.
