Hybrid Deep Neural Network - Hidden Markov Model (DNN-HMM) based speech emotion recognition

Deep Neural Network Hidden Markov Models, or DNN-HMMs, are recently very promising acoustic models achieving good speech recognition results over Gaussian mixture model based HMMs (GMM-HMMs). In this paper, for emotion recognition from speech, we investigate DNN-HMMs with restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) based unsupervised pre-training, and DNN-HMMs with discriminative pre-training. Emotion recognition experiments are carried out on these two models on the eNTERFACE'05 database and Berlin database, respectively, and results are compared with those from the GMM-HMMs, the shallow-NN-HMMs with two layers, as well as the Multi-layer Perceptrons HMMs (MLP-HMMs). Experimental results show that when the numbers of the hidden layers as well hidden units are properly set, the DNN could extend the labeling ability of GMM-HMM. Among all the models, the DNN-HMMs with discriminative pre-training obtain the best results. For example, for the eNTERFACE'05 database, the recognition accuracy improves 12.22% from the DNN-HMMs with unsupervised pre-training, 11.67% from the GMM-HMMs, 10.56% from the MLP-HMMs, and even 17.22% from the shallow-NN-HMMs, respectively.