Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech is a natural means of conveying emotions, making it an effective method for understanding and representing human feelings. Reliable speech emotion recognition (SER) is central to applications in human-computer interaction, healthcare, education, and customer service. However, most SER methods depend on heavy backbone models or hand-crafted features that fail to balance accuracy and efficiency, particularly for low-resource languages like Bangla. In this work, we present SpectroFusion-ViT, a lightweight SER framework built utilizing EfficientViT-b0, a compact Vision Transformer architecture equipped with self-attention to capture long-range temporal and spectral patterns. The model contains only 2.04M parameters and requires 0.1 GFLOPs, enabling deployment in resource-constrained settings without compromising accuracy. Our pipeline first performs preprocessing and augmentation on raw audio, then extracts Chroma and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features. These representations are fused into a complementary time-frequency descriptor that preserves both fine-grained spectral detail and broader harmonic structure. Using transfer learning, EfficientViT-b0 is fine-tuned for multi-class emotion classification. We evaluate the system on two benchmark Bangla emotional speech datasets, SUBESCO and BanglaSER, which vary in speaker diversity, recording conditions, and acoustic characteristics. The proposed approach achieves 92.56% accuracy on SUBESCO and 82.19% on BanglaSER, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods. These findings demonstrate that lightweight transformer architectures can deliver robust SER performance while remaining computationally efficient for real-world deployment.

This work presents iMiGUE-Speech, an extension of the iMiGUE dataset that provides a spontaneous affective corpus for studying emotional and affective states. The new release focuses on speech and enriches the original dataset with additional metadata, including speech transcripts, speaker-role separation between interviewer and interviewee, and word-level forced alignments. Unlike existing emotional speech datasets that rely on acted or laboratory-elicited emotions, iMiGUE-Speech captures spontaneous affect arising naturally from real match outcomes. To demonstrate the utility of the dataset and establish initial benchmarks, we introduce two evaluation tasks for comparative assessment: speech emotion recognition and transcript-based sentiment analysis. These tasks leverage state-of-the-art pre-trained representations to assess the dataset's ability to capture spontaneous affective states from both acoustic and linguistic modalities. iMiGUE-Speech can also be synchronously paired with micro-gesture annotations from the original iMiGUE dataset, forming a uniquely multimodal resource for studying speech-gesture affective dynamics. The extended dataset is available at https://github.com/CV-AC/imigue-speech.

This paper highlights the critical importance of multi-channel speech enhancement (MCSE) for speech emotion recognition (ER) in cocktail party scenarios. A multi-channel speech dereverberation and separation front-end integrating DNN-WPE and mask-based MVDR is used to extract the target speaker's speech from the mixture speech, before being fed into the downstream ER back-end using HuBERT- and ViT-based speech and visual features. Experiments on mixture speech constructed using the IEMOCAP and MSP-FACE datasets suggest the MCSE output consistently outperforms domain fine-tuned single-channel speech representations produced by: a) Conformer-based metric GANs; and b) WavLM SSL features with optional SE-ER dual task fine-tuning. Statistically significant increases in weighted, unweighted accuracy and F1 measures by up to 9.5%, 8.5% and 9.1% absolute (17.1%, 14.7% and 16.0% relative) are obtained over the above single-channel baselines. The generalization of IEMOCAP trained MCSE front-ends are also shown when being zero-shot applied to out-of-domain MSP-FACE data.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) has traditionally relied on categorical or dimensional labels. However, this technique is limited in representing both the diversity and interpretability of emotions. To overcome this limitation, we focus on color attributes, such as hue, saturation, and value, to represent emotions as continuous and interpretable scores. We annotated an emotional speech corpus with color attributes via crowdsourcing and analyzed them. Moreover, we built regression models for color attributes in SER using machine learning and deep learning, and explored the multitask learning of color attribute regression and emotion classification. As a result, we demonstrated the relationship between color attributes and emotions in speech, and successfully developed color attribute regression models for SER. We also showed that multitask learning improved the performance of each task.

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) infers a speaker's emotional state from speech and is increasingly deployed in human-computer interaction, education, and healthcare. Because speech also carries sensitive personal information, speakers may ask that some of their recordings be deleted, which requires removing the influence of those samples from an already trained SER model. Most machine unlearning methods can meet this request only with access to the remaining training data alongside the samples to be forgotten; this is impractical when the remaining data cannot be redistributed or has itself been deleted, and it adds storage and computation as the data grows. To this end, we propose a retain-free unlearning method that updates a pre-trained SER model using only the forget set. Our key idea is to synthesise adversarial samples from the forget set as a surrogate for the unavailable remaining data, and to constrain each parameter update by its estimated importance so that forgetting does not erase general knowledge. The experiments over several emotional-speech corpora and self-supervised backbones show that our method drives forget-set performance down to near chance while retaining much of the model's utility on the remaining and unseen-speaker data, narrowing the gap to methods that rely on the remaining set.

The process of identifying human emotion and affective states from speech is known as speech emotion recognition (SER). This is based on the observation that tone and pitch in the voice frequently convey underlying emotion. Speech recognition includes the ability to recognize emotions, which is becoming increasingly popular and in high demand. With the help of appropriate factors (such modalities, emotions, intensities, repetitions, etc.) found in the data, my research seeks to use the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to distinguish emotions from audio recordings and label them in accordance with the range of different emotions. I have developed a machine learning model to identify emotions from supplied audio files with the aid of machine learning methods. The evaluation is mostly focused on precision, recall, and F1 score, which are common machine learning metrics. To properly set up and train the machine learning framework, the main objective is to investigate the influence and cross-relation of all input and output parameters. To improve the ability to recognize intentions, a key condition for communication, I have evaluated emotions using my specialized machine learning algorithm via voice that would address the emotional state from voice with the help of digital healthcare, bridging the gap between human and artificial intelligence (AI).