Detection of human emotions using features based on the multiwavelet transform of EEG signals

Abstract

Emotion classification based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is a relatively new area of research in the development of brain computer interface (BCI) system with challenging issues like induction of the emotional states and the extraction of the features in order to obtain optimum classification of human emotions. The emotion classification system based on BCI can be useful in many areas like as entertainment, education, and health care. This chapter presents a new method for human emotion classification using multiwavelet transform of EEG signals. The EEG signal contains useful information related to the different emotional states, which helps us to understand the psychology and neurology of the human brain. The features namely, ratio of the norms based measure, Shannon entropy measure, and normalized Renyi entropy measure are computed from the sub-signals generated by multiwavelet decomposition of EEG signals. These features have been used as an input to multiclass least squares support vector machine (MC-LS-SVM) together with the radial basis function (RBF), Mexican hat wavelet, and Morlet wavelet kernel functions for classification of human emotions from EEG signals. The classification performance of the proposed method for classification of emotions using EEG signals determined by computing the classification accuracy, ten-fold crossvalidation, and confusion matrix. The proposed method has provided classification accuracy of 84.79% for classification of human emotions namely happy, neutral, sadness, and fear from EEG signals with Morlet wavelet kernel function of MC-LSSVM. The audio–video stimulus has been used for inducing the emotions in EEG signals. The experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method for classification of human emotions from EEG signals. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.