MS-SENet: Enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition Through Multi-Scale Feature Fusion with Squeeze-and-Excitation Blocks

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has become a growing focus of research in human-computer interaction. Spatiotemporal features play a crucial role in SER, yet current research lacks comprehensive spatiotemporal feature learning. This paper focuses on addressing this gap by proposing a novel approach. In this paper, we employ Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with varying kernel sizes for spatial and temporal feature extraction. Additionally, we introduce Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) modules to capture and fuse multi-scale features, facilitating effective information fusion for improved emotion recognition and a deeper understanding of the temporal evolution of speech emotion. Moreover, we employ skip-connections and Spatial Dropout (SD) layers to prevent overfitting and increase the model’s depth. Our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method, achieving an average UAR and WAR improvement of 1.62% and 1.32%, respectively, across six benchmark SER datasets. Further experiments demonstrated that our method can fully extract spatiotemporal features in low-resource conditions.