Automated speech emotion polarization for a distance education system based on orbital local binary pattern and an appropriate sub-band selection technique.

The distance education system was widely adopted during the Covid-19 pandemic by many institutions of learning. To measure the effectiveness of this system, it is essential to evaluate the performance of the lecturers. To this end, an automated speech emotion recognition model is a solution. This research aims to develop an accurate speech emotion recognition model that will check the lecturers/instructors' emotional state during lecture presentations. A new speech emotion dataset is collected, and an automated speech emotion recognition (SER) model is proposed to achieve this aim. The presented SER model contains three main phases, which are (i) feature extraction using multi-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and one-dimensional orbital local binary pattern (1D-OLBP), (ii) feature selection using neighborhood component analysis (NCA), (iii) classification using support vector machine (SVM) with ten-fold cross-validation. The proposed 1D-OLBP and NCA-based model is tested on the collected dataset, containing three emotional states with 7101 sound segments. The presented 1D-OLBP and NCA-based technique achieved a 93.40% classification accuracy using the proposed model on the new dataset. Moreover, the proposed architecture has been tested on the three publicly available speech emotion recognition datasets to highlight the general classification ability of this self-organized model. We reached over 70% classification accuracies for all three public datasets, and these results demonstrated the success of this model.

Shoelace pattern-based speech emotion recognition of the lecturers in distance education: ShoePat23

Background and objective We are living in the pandemic age, and many educational institutions have shifted to a distance education system to ensure learning continuity while at the same time curtailing the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Automated speech emotion classification models can be used to measure the lecturer's performance during the lecture. Material and method In this work, we collected a new lecturer's speech dataset to detect three emotions: positive, neutral, and negative. The dataset is divided into segments with a length of five seconds per segment. Each segment has been utilized as an observation and contains 9541 observations. To automatically classify these emotions, a hand-modeled learning approach is presented. This approach has a comprehensive feature extraction method. In the feature extraction, a shoelace-based local feature generator is introduced, called Shoelace Pattern. The suggested feature extractor generates features at a low level. To further improve the feature generation capability of the Shoelace Pattern, tunable q wavelet transform (TQWT) is used to create sub-bands. Shoelace Pattern generates features from raw speech and sub-bands, and the proposed feature extraction method selects the most suitable feature vectors. The top four feature vectors are selected and merged to obtain the final feature vector. By deploying neighborhood component analysis (NCA), we chose the most informative 512 features, and these features are classified using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier using 10-fold cross-validation. Results The proposed learning model based on the shoelace pattern (ShoePat23) attained 94.97% and 96.41% classification accuracies on the collected speech databases consecutively. Conclusions The findings demonstrate the success of the ShoePat23 on speech emotion recognition. Moreover, this model has been used in the distance education system to detect the performance of the lecturers.