OpenEAR — Introducing the munich open-source emotion and affect recognition toolkit

A novel open-source affect and emotion recognition engine, which integrates all necessary components in one highly efficient software package, and which can be used for batch processing of databases.

Abstract

Various open-source toolkits exist for speech recognition and speech processing. These toolkits have brought a great benefit to the research community, i.e. speeding up research. Yet, no such freely available toolkit exists for automatic affect recognition from speech. We herein introduce a novel open-source affect and emotion recognition engine, which integrates all necessary components in one highly efficient software package. The components include audio recording and audio file reading, state-of-the-art paralinguistic feature extraction and plugable classification modules. In this paper we introduce the engine and extensive baseline results. Pre-trained models for four affect recognition tasks are included in the openEAR distribution. The engine is tailored for multi-threaded, incremental on-line processing of live input in real-time, however it can also be used for batch processing of databases.