Emotion Classification in Arousal Valence Model using MAHNOB-HCI Database

Emotion recognition from physiological signals attracted the attention of researchers from different disciplines, such as affective computing, cognitive science and psychology. This paper aims to classify emotional statements using peripheral physiological signals based on arousal-valence evaluation. These signals are the Electrocardiogram, Respiration Volume, Skin Temperature and Galvanic Skin Response. We explored the signals collected in the MAHNOB-HCI multimodal tagging database. We defined the emotion into three different ways: two and three classes using 1-9 discrete self-rating scales and another model using 9 emotional keywords to establish the three defined areas in arousal-valence dimensions. To perform the accuracies, we began by removing the artefacts and noise from the signals, and then we extracted 169 features. We finished by classifying the emotional states using the support vector machine. The obtained results showed that the electrocardiogram and respiration volume were the most relevant signals for human’s feeling recognition task. Moreover, the obtained accuracies were promising comparing to recent related works for each of the three establishments of emotion modeling.