Physiological signals contain considerable information regarding emotions. This paper investigated the ability of photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals to recognize emotion, adopting a two-dimensional emotion model based on valence and arousal to represent human feelings. The main purpose was to recognize short term emotion using a single PPG signal pulse. We used a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN) to extract PPG signal features to classify the valence and arousal. We split the PPG signal into a single 1.1 s pulse and normalized it for input to the neural network based on the personal maximum and minimum values. We chose the dataset for emotion analysis using physiological (DEAP) signals for the experiment and tested the 1D CNN as a binary classification (high or low valence and arousal), achieving the short-term emotion recognition of 1.1 s with 75.3% and 76.2% valence and arousal accuracies, respectively, on the DEAP data.

Emotion recognition research has been conducted using various physiological signals. In this paper, we propose an efficient photoplethysmogram-based method that fuses the deep features extracted by two deep convolutional neural networks and the statistical features selected by Pearson’s correlation technique. A photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal can be easily obtained through many devices, and the procedure for recording this signal is simpler than that for other physiological signals. The normal-to-normal (NN) interval values of heart rate variability (HRV) were utilized to extract the time domain features, and the normalized PPG signal was used to acquire the frequency domain features. Then, we selected features that correlated highly with an emotion through Pearson’s correlation. These statistical features were fused with deep-learning features extracted from a convolutional neural network (CNN). The PPG signal and the NN interval were used as the inputs of the CNN to extract the features, and the total concatenated features were utilized to classify the valence and the arousal, which are the basic parameters of emotion. The Database for Emotion Analysis using Physiological signals (DEAP) was chosen for the experiment, and the results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved a noticeable performance with a short recognition interval.