Cross-Subject Emotion Recognition Using Flexible Analytic Wavelet Transform from EEG Signals

Abstract

Human emotion is a physical or psychological process which is triggered either consciously or unconsciously due to perception of any object or situation. The electroencephalogram (EEG) signals can be used to record ongoing neuronal activities in the brain to get the information about the human emotional state. These complicated neuronal activities in the brain cause non-stationary behavior of the EEG signals. Thus, emotion recognition using EEG signals is a challenging study and it requires advanced signal processing techniques to extract the hidden information of emotions from EEG signals. Due to poor generalizability of features from EEG signals across subjects, recognizing cross-subject emotion has been difficult. Thus, our aim is to comprehensively investigate the channel specific nature of EEG signals and to provide an effective method based on flexible analytic wavelet transform (FAWT) for recognition of emotion. FAWT decomposes the EEG signal into different sub-band signals. Furthermore, we applied information potential to extract the features from the decomposed sub-band signals of EEG signal. The extracted feature values were smoothed and fed to the random forest and support vector machine classifiers that classified the emotions. The proposed method is applied to two different publicly available databases which are SJTU emotion EEG dataset and database for emotion analysis using physiological signal. The proposed method has shown better performance for human emotion classification as compared to the existing method. Moreover, it yields channel specific subject classification of emotion EEG signals when exposed to the same stimuli. © 2001-2012 IEEE.