EmoNet: A Lightweight Attention-Based CNN for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is a fundamental task in affective computing that enables applications such as mental health assessment, human-computer interaction, and automated customer support systems. Accurate emotion classification from speech remains challenging due to variations in speaker style, acoustic conditions, and the high computational cost of modern deep learning approaches. Many existing systems depend on large transformer-based architectures that require substantial computational resources, making them less suitable for real-time or resource-constrained environments. This research proposes EmoNet, a lightweight deep learning framework for speech emotion classification across seven emotion categories. The model is built on a four-block depthwise separable CNN encoder with squeeze-and-excitation attention and residual connections, combined with a Bidirectional LSTM for temporal feature learning and a multi-head attention pooling mechanism for improved representation. A comprehensive 134-channel acoustic feature set alongside data augmentation techniques including audio-level perturbations and SpecAugment is employed to improve robustness under diverse acoustic conditions. Evaluated on a combined dataset of TESS, RAVDESS, and SAVEE, EmoNet achieves a test accuracy of 96.75% with only 4.11 million parameters. The proposed model outperforms its reproduced baseline and remains competitive with significantly larger state-of-the-art architectures.