Formant position based weighted spectral features for emotion recognition

► We introduce WMFCC features for emotion recognition from speech. ► The WMFCC is an early data fusion of spectral content and formant location information. ► We experimentally evaluate WMFCC features and late decision fusion methods. ► The WMFCC features and late fusion provide significant improvements. In this paper, we propose novel spectrally weighted mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (WMFCC) features for emotion recognition from speech. The idea is based on the fact that formant locations carry emotion-related information, and therefore critical spectral bands around formant locations can be emphasized during the calculation of MFCC features. The spectral weighting is derived from the normalized inverse harmonic mean function of the line spectral frequency (LSF) features, which are known to be localized around formant frequencies. The above approach can be considered as an early data fusion of spectral content and formant location information. We also investigate methods for late decision fusion of unimodal classifiers. We evaluate the proposed WMFCC features together with the standard spectral and prosody features using HMM based classifiers on the spontaneous FAU Aibo emotional speech corpus. The results show that unimodal classifiers with the WMFCC features perform significantly better than the classifiers with standard spectral features. Late decision fusion of classifiers provide further significant performance improvements.