An ICA-based method for stress classification from voice samples

Emotion detection is a hot topic nowadays for its potential application to intelligent systems in different fields such as neuromarketing, dialogue systems, friendly robotics, vending platforms and amiable banking. Nevertheless, the lack of a benchmarking standard makes it difficult to compare results produced by different methodologies, which could help the research community improve existing approaches and design new ones. Besides, there is the added problem of accurate dataset production. Most of the emotional speech databases and associated documentation are either privative or not publicly available. Therefore, in this work, two stress-elicited databases containing speech from male and female speakers were recruited, and four classification methods are compared in order to detect and classify speech under stress. Results from each method are presented to show their quality performance, besides the final scores attained, in what is a novel approach to the field of study.