Ransac-based training data selection on spectral features for emotion recognition from spontaneous speech

Abstract

Training datasets containing spontaneous emotional speech are often imperfect due the ambiguities and difficulties of labeling such data by human observers. In this paper, we present a Random Sampling Consensus (RANSAC) based training approach for the problem of emotion recognition from spontaneous speech recordings. Our motivation is to insert a data cleaning process to the training phase of the Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for the purpose of removing some suspicious instances of labels that may exist in the training dataset. Our experiments using HMMs with Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Line Spectral Frequency (LSF) features indicate that utilization of RANSAC in the training phase provides an improvement in the unweighted recall rates on the test set. Experimental studies performed over the FAU Aibo Emotion Corpus demonstrate that decision fusion configurations with LSF and MFCC based classifiers provide further significant performance improvements. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.