Multi classifier systems and forward backward feature selection algorithms to classify emotional coloured speech

Abstract

Systems for the recognition of psychological characteristics such as the emotional state in real world scenarios have to deal with several difficulties. Amongst those are unconstrained environments and uncertainties in one or several input channels. However a more crucial aspect is the content of the data itself. Psychological states are highly person-dependent and often even humans are not able to determine the correct state a person is in. A successful recognition system thus has to deal with data, that is not very discriminative and often simply misleading. In order to succeed, a critical view on features and decisions is essential to select only the most valuable ones. This work presents a comparison of a common multi classifier system approach based on state of the art features and a modified forward backward feature selection algorithm with a long term stopping criteria. The second approach takes also features of the voice quality family into account. Both approaches are based on the audio modality only. The dataset used in the challenge is an in between dataset of real world datasets which are still very hard to handle and over acted datasets which were famous in the past and today are well understood.