Emotion recognition from speech using global and local prosodic features

In this paper, global and local prosodic features extracted from sentence, word and syllables are proposed for speech emotion or affect recognition. In this work, duration, pitch, and energy values are used to represent the prosodic information, for recognizing the emotions from speech. Global prosodic features represent the gross statistics such as mean, minimum, maximum, standard deviation, and slope of the prosodic contours. Local prosodic features represent the temporal dynamics in the prosody. In this work, global and local prosodic features are analyzed separately and in combination at different levels for the recognition of emotions. In this study, we have also explored the words and syllables at different positions (initial, middle, and final) separately, to analyze their contribution towards the recognition of emotions. In this paper, all the studies are carried out using simulated Telugu emotion speech corpus (IITKGP-SESC). These results are compared with the results of internationally known Berlin emotion speech corpus (Emo-DB). Support vector machines are used to develop the emotion recognition models. The results indicate that, the recognition performance using local prosodic features is better compared to the performance of global prosodic features. Words in the final position of the sentences, syllables in the final position of the words exhibit more emotion discriminative information compared to the words and syllables present in the other positions.