RoutingConvNet: A Light-weight Speech Emotion Recognition Model Based on Bidirectional MFCC

In this study, we propose a new light-weight model RoutingConvNet with fewer parameters to improve the applicability and practicality of speech emotion recognition. To reduce the number of learnable parameters, the proposed model connects bidirectional MFCCs on a channel-by-channel basis to learn long-term emotion dependence and extract contextual features. A light-weight deep CNN is constructed for low-level feature extraction, and self-attention is used to obtain information about channel and spatial signals in speech signals. In addition, we apply dynamic routing to improve the accuracy and construct a model that is robust to feature variations. The proposed model shows parameter reduction and accuracy improvement in the overall experiments of speech emotion datasets (EMO-DB, RAVDESS, and IEMOCAP), achieving 87.86%, 83.44%, and 66.06% accuracy respectively with about 156,000 parameters. In this study, we proposed a metric to calculate the trade-off between the number of parameters and accuracy for performance evaluation against light-weight.