This paper introduces scattering transform for speech emotion recognition (SER). Scattering transform generates feature representations which remain stable to deformations and shifting in time and frequency without much loss of information. In speech, the emotion cues are spread across time and localised in frequency. The time and frequency invariance characteristic of scattering coefficients provides a representation robust against emotion irrelevant variations e.g., different speakers, language, gender etc. while preserving the variations caused by emotion cues. Hence, such a representation captures the emotion information more efficiently from speech. We perform experiments to compare scattering coefficients with standard mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) over different databases. It is observed that frequency scattering performs better than time-domain scattering and MFCCs. We also investigate layer-wise scattering coefficients to analyse the importance of time shift and deformation stable scalogram and modulation spectrum coefficients for SER. We observe that layer-wise coefficients taken independently also perform better than MFCCs.
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