Deep and shallow features fusion based on deep convolutional neural network for speech emotion recognition

Recent years have witnessed the great progress for speech emotion recognition using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). In order to improve the performance of speech emotion recognition, a novel feature fusion method is proposed. With going deeper of the convolutional layers, the convolutional feature of traditional DCNNs gradually become more abstract, which may not be the best feature for speech emotion recognition. On the other hand, the shallow feature includes only global information without the detailed information extracted by deeper convolutional layers. According to these observations, we design a deep and shallow feature fusion convolutional network, which combines the feature from different levels of network for speech emotion recognition. The proposed network allows us to fully exploit deep and shallow feature. The popular Berlin data set is used in our experiments, the experimental results show that our proposed network can further improve speech emotion recognition rate which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed network.