144
Copyright © 2010, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Chapter 8
Voice Driven Emotion
Recognizer Mobile Phone:
Proposal and Evaluations
Aishah Abdul Razak
Multimedia University, Malaysia
Mohamad Izani Zainal Abidin
Multimedia University, Malaysia
Ryoichi Komiya
Multimedia University, Malaysia
ABSTRACT
This article proposes an application of emotion recognizer system in telecommunications entitled voice
driven emotion recognizer mobile phone (VDERM). The design implements a voice-to-image conver-
sion scheme through a voice-to-image converter that extracts emotion features in the voice, recognizes
them, and selects the corresponding facial expression images from image bank. Since it only requires
audio transmission, it can support video communication at a much lower bit rate than the conventional
videophone. The first prototype of VDERM system has been implemented into a personal computer. The
coder, voice-to-image converter, image database, and system interface are preinstalled in the personal
computer. In this article, we present and discuss some evaluations that have been conducted in sup-
porting this proposed prototype. The results have shown that both voice and image are important for
people to correctly recognize emotion in telecommunications and the proposed solution can provide
an alternative to videophone systems. The future works list some modifications that can be done to the
proposed prototype in order to make it more practical for mobile applications.
INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION
Nonverbal communication plays a very important
role in human communications (Komiya, Mohd
Arif, Ramliy, Gowri, & Mokhtar, 1999). However,
in telephone systems, only audio information
can be exchanged. Thus, using telephony, the
transmission of nonverbal information such as