A system for feature classification of emotions based on speech analysis; applications to human-robot interaction

A system for recognition of emotions based on speech analysis can have interesting applications in human robot interaction. Robot should make a proper mutual communication between sound recognition and perception for creating a desired emotional interaction with humans. Advanced research in this field will be based on sound analysis and recognition of emotions in spontaneous dialog. In this paper, we report the results obtained from an exploratory study on a methodology to automatically recognize and classify basic emotional states. The study attempted to investigate the appropriateness of using acoustic and phonetic properties of emotive speech with the minimal use of signal processing algorithms. The efficiency of the methodology was evaluated by experimental tests on adult European speakers. The speakers had to repeat six simple sentences in English language in order to emphasize features of the pitch (peak, value and range), the intensity of the speech, the formants and the speech rate. The proposed methodology using the freeware program (PRAAT) and consists of generating and analyzing a graph of pitch, formant and intensity of speech signals for classify basic emotion. Eventually, the proposed model provided successful recognition of the basic emotion in most of the cases.