Multi-Microphone and Multi-Modal Emotion Recognition in Reverbrant Enviroment

This paper presents a Multi-modal Emotion Recognition (MER) system designed to enhance emotion recognition accuracy in challenging acoustic conditions. Our approach combines a modified and extended Hierarchical Token-semantic Audio Transformer (HTS-AT) for multi-channel audio processing with an R(2+1)D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) model for video analysis. We evaluate our proposed method on a reverberated version of the Ryerson audio-visual database of emotional speech and song (RAVDESS) dataset using synthetic and real-world Room Impulse Responsess (RIRs). Our results demonstrate that integrating audio and video modalities yields superior performance compared to uni-modal approaches, especially in challenging acoustic conditions. Moreover, we show that the multimodal (audiovisual) approach that utilizes multiple microphones outperforms its single-microphone counterpart.

Multi-Microphone Speech Emotion Recognition using the Hierarchical Token-semantic Audio Transformer Architecture

Most emotion recognition systems fail in real-life situations (in the wild scenarios) where the audio is contaminated by reverberation. Our study explores new methods to alleviate the performance degradation of Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) algorithms and develop a more robust system for adverse conditions. We propose processing multi-microphone signals to address these challenges and improve emotion classification accuracy. We adopt a state-of-the-art transformer model, the Hierarchical Token-semantic Audio Transformer (HTS-AT), to handle multi-channel audio inputs. We evaluate two strategies: averaging mel-spectrograms across channels and summing patch-embedded representations. Our multimicrophone model achieves superior performance compared to single-channel baselines when tested on real-world reverberant environments.