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Combining formant frequency based on variable order LPC coding with acoustic features for TIMIT phone recognition

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Abstract

Combination of multiple acoustic features has great potential to improve Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) accuracy. Our contribution in this research was to investigate one novel method when using voiced formants’ features in combination with standard MFCC features in order to enhance TIMIT phone recognition. These voiced features provide accurate formants frequencies using a Variable Order LPC Coding (VO-LPC) algorithm that was combined with continuity constraints. The overall estimating formants were concatenated with MFCC features when a voiced frame could be detected. For feature-level combination, Heteroscedastic Linear Discriminant Analysis (HLDA) based approach had been used successfully to find an optimal linear combination of successive vectors of a single feature stream.

A series of experiments on phone recognition speaker-independent continuous-speech had been carried out using a subset of the large read-speech TIMIT phone corpus. Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) was also used throughout all carried experiments. Using such feature level combination, optimized mixture splitting and a bigram language model, a detailed analysis on this combination performance was discussed for Context-Independent (CI) and Context-Dependent (CD) Hidden Markov Models (HMM). Experimental results from our proposed procedure showed that phone error rate was successfully decreased by about 3%. At phonetic level group, an increase of 8% and of 10% was observed respectively for vowel and liquid group. These results proved clear phone enhancement regarding existing state of the art.

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  1. Technologie de l’information et électronique médicale, ATMS–LETI, ENIS, Sfax University, Sfax, Tunisie

    Zaineb Ben Messaoud & Ahmed Ben Hamida

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  1. Zaineb Ben Messaoud
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  2. Ahmed Ben Hamida
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Correspondence to Zaineb Ben Messaoud.

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Ben Messaoud, Z., Ben Hamida, A. Combining formant frequency based on variable order LPC coding with acoustic features for TIMIT phone recognition. Int J Speech Technol 14, 393–403 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-011-9119-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-011-9119-z

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