Emotion recognition in spontaneous speech using GMMs

Automatic detection of emotions has been evaluated using standard Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients, MFCCs, and a variant, MFCC-low, calculated between 20 and 300 Hz, in order to model pitch. Also plain pitch features have been used. These acoustic features have all been modeled by Gaussian mixture models, GMMs, on the frame level. The method has been tested on two different corpora and languages; Swedish voice controlled telephone services and English meetings. The results indicate that using GMMs on the frame level is a feasible technique for emotion classification. The two MFCC methods have similar performance, and MFCC-low outperforms the pitch features. Combining the three classifiers significantly improves performance.