Development of emotion classifier based on absolute and differential attributes of averaged signals of visually stimulated event related potentials

Analysis and study of abstract human relations have always posed a daunting challenge for technocrats engaged in the field of psychometric analysis. The study on emotion recognition is all the more demanding as it involves integration of abstract phenomenon of emotion causation and emotion appraisal through physiological and brain signals. This paper describes the classification of human emotions into four classes, namely: low valence high arousal (LVHA), high valence high arousal (HVHA), high valence low arousal (HVLA) and low valence low arousal (LVLA) using Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. The EEG signals have been collected on three EEG electrodes along the central line viz: Fz, Cz and Pz. The analysis has been done on average event related potentials (ERPs) and difference of average ERPs using Support Vector Machine (SVM) polynomial classifier. The four-class classification accuracy of 75% using average ERP attributes and an accuracy of 76.8% using difference of ERPs as attributes has been obtained. The accuracy obtained using differential average ERP attributes is better as compared with the already existing studies.