Abstract
Emotions play a vital role in recognizing a person's thoughts and vary significantly with stress levels. Emotion and stress classification have gained considerable attention in robotics and artificial intelligence applications. While numerous methods based on machine learning techniques provide average classification performance, recent deep learning approaches offer enhanced results. This research presents a hybrid deep learning model that extracts features using AlexNet and DenseNet models, followed by feature fusion and dimensionality reduction via Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The reduced features are then classified using a multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM) to categorize different types of emotions. The proposed model was evaluated using the DEAP and EEG Brainwave datasets, both well-suited for emotion analysis due to their comprehensive EEG signal recordings and diverse emotional stimuli. The DEAP dataset includes EEG signals from 32 participants who watched 40 one-minute music videos, while the EEG Brainwave dataset categorizes emotions into positive, negative, and neutral based on EEG recordings from participants exposed to six different film clips. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 95.54% and 97.26% for valence and arousal categories in the DEAP dataset, respectively, and 98.42% for the EEG Brainwave dataset. These results significantly outperform existing methods, demonstrating the model's superior performance in terms of precision, recall, F1-score, specificity, and Mathew correlation coefficient. The integration of AlexNet and DenseNet, combined with PCA and multi-class SVM, makes this approach particularly effective for capturing the intricate patterns in EEG data, highlighting its potential for applications in human-computer interaction and mental health monitoring, marking a significant advancement over traditional methods.