Voice Driven Emotion Recognizer Mobile Phone: Proposal and Evaluations

This article proposes an application of emotion recognizer system in telecommunications entitled voice driven emotion recognizer mobile phone (VDERM). The design implements a voice-to-image conversion scheme through a voice-to-image converter that extracts emotion features in the voice, recognizes them, and selects the corresponding facial expression images from image bank. Since it only requires audio transmission, it can support video communication at a much lower bit rate than the conventional videophone. The first prototype of VDERM system has been implemented into a personal computer. The coder, voice-to-image converter, image database, and system interface are preinstalled in the personal computer. In this article, we present and discuss some evaluations that have been conducted in supporting this proposed prototype. The results have shown that both voice and image are important for people to correctly recognize emotion in telecommunications and the proposed solution can provide an alternative to videophone systems. The future works list some modifications that can be done to the proposed prototype in order to make it more practical for mobile applications. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION Nonverbal communication plays a very important role in human communications (Komiya, Mohd Arif, Ramliy, Gowri, & Mokhtar, 1999). However,