Multi-Microphone Speech Emotion Recognition Using the Hierarchical Token-Semantic Audio Transformer Architecture

The performance of most emotion recognition systems degrades in real-life situations ("in the wild" scenarios) where the audio is contaminated by reverberation. Our study explores new methods to alleviate the performance degradation of Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) algorithms and develop a more robust system for adverse conditions. We propose processing multi-microphone signals to address these challenges and improve emotion classification accuracy. We adopt a state-of-the-art transformer model, the Hierarchical Token-semantic Audio Transformer (HTS-AT), to handle multi-channel audio inputs. We evaluate two strategies: averaging mel-spectrograms across channels and summing patch-embedded representations. Our multi-microphone model achieves superior performance compared to single-channel baselines when tested on real-world reverberant environments.