Patent Document ID: 9972341
Application ID: 14518874

Base Claim:
1. An apparatus for emotion recognition, the apparatus comprising a processor that comprises: a frame parameter generator configured to detect a plurality of unit frames from an input speech and to generate a parameter vector for each of the unit frames; a key-frame selector configured to select a unit frame as a key frame among the plurality of unit frames; an emotion-probability calculator configured to calculate an emotion probability of the selected key frame; and an emotion determiner configured to determine an emotion of a speaker based on the calculated emotion probability, wherein the key-frame selector is configured to select a unit frame with a lower probability of presence than a predetermined fraction of the plurality of unit frames as the key frame, and wherein the emotion-probability calculator is configured to calculate the emotion probability by extracting a global feature from the selected key frame and classifying an emotion of the speaker into at least one of predefined emotion categories using a support vector machine (SVM) mechanism and the global feature, or by classifying an emotion of the speaker into at least one emotion category that corresponds to a generative model that is capable of generating a largest number of parameter vectors same as or similar to those of the key frames, wherein the generative model is one of Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM), which are obtained from learning each emotion category.

---

Claim 8:
8. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the key-frame selector is further configured to select additional key frames from among the plurality of unit frames; the emotion-probability calculator is further configured to calculate an additional emotion probability of each of the selected additional key frames; and the emotion determiner is further configured to determine the emotion of the speaker based on the calculated emotion probability and the additional emotion probabilities.