A Fuzzy Deep Neural Network with Sparse Autoencoder for Emotional Intention Understanding in Human-Robot Interaction

A fuzzy deep neural network with sparse autoencoder (FDNNSA) is proposed for intention understanding based on human emotions and identification information (i.e., age, gender, and region), in which the fuzzy C-means (FCM) is used to cluster the input data, and deep neural network with sparse autoencoder (DNNSA) is designed for emotional intention understanding in human-robot interaction. It aims to make robots capable of recognizing human emotions and understanding related emotional intention, the FCM is suitable for gathering similar information so that the calculations of dimensionality of DNNSA will be reduced, and the sparse autoencoder of DNNSA can make the neuron of DNNSA sparse to reduce the complexity of the network in such a way human-robot interaction is running smoothly. To validate the proposal, simulation experiments based on benchmark databases such as facial expression database of CK+, and speech emotion corpus of CASIA were completed. The experimental results show that the proposal outperforms the baseline algorithms of Softmax regression (SR), DNNSA, FCM-based SR (FSR), Softplus, Gath Geva-based DNNSA (GDNNSA), and ensemble DNNSA (EDNNSA). Preliminary application experiments are performed in the development of emotional social robot system, where volunteers experience the scenario of "drinking at the bar". The obtained results indicate that the proposed FDNNSA can promote robot understanding of emotional intention of human.