Emotion recognition from speech: a review

Emotion recognition from speech has emerged as an important research area in the recent past. In this regard, review of existing work on emotional speech processing is useful for carrying out further research. In this paper, the recent literature on speech emotion recognition has been presented considering the issues related to emotional speech corpora, different types of speech features and models used for recognition of emotions from speech. Thirty two representative speech databases are reviewed in this work from point of view of their language, number of speakers, number of emotions, and purpose of collection. The issues related to emotional speech databases used in emotional speech recognition are also briefly discussed. Literature on different features used in the task of emotion recognition from speech is presented. The importance of choosing different classification models has been discussed along with the review. The important issues to be considered for further emotion recognition research in general and in specific to the Indian context have been highlighted where ever necessary.