Enhanced Autocorrelation in Real World Emotion Recognition

Abstract

Multimodal emotion recognition in real world environments is still a challenging task of affective computing research. Recognizing the affective or physiological state of an individual is difficult for humans as well as for computer systems, and thus finding suitable discriminative features is the most promising approach in multimodal emotion recognition. In the literature numerous features have been developed or adapted from related signal processing tasks. But still, classifying emotional states in real world scenarios is difficult and the performance of automatic classifiers is rather limited. This is mainly due to the fact that emotional states can not be distinguished by a well defined set of discriminating features. In this work we present an enhanced autocorrelation feature as a multi pitch detection feature and compare its performance to feature well known, and state-of-the-art in signal and speech processing. Results of the evaluation show that the enhanced autocorrelation outperform other state-of-the-art features in case of the challenge data set. The complexity of this benchmark data set lies in between real world data sets showing naturalistic emotional utterances, and the widely applied and well-understood acted emotional data sets.