A strategic approach to recognize the speech of the children with hearing impairment: different sets of features and models

Abstract

The automatic speech recognition system is developed and tested for recognizing the speeches of a normal person in various languages. This paper mainly emphasizes the need for the development of a more challenging speaker independent speech recognition system for hearing impaired to recognize the speeches uttered by any Hearing Impaired (HI) speaker. In this work, Gamma tone energy features with filters spaced an equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB), MEL & BARK scale, and MFPLPC features are used at the front end and vector quantization (VQ) & multivariate hidden Markov models (MHMM) at the back end for recognizing the speeches uttered by any hearing impaired speaker. Performance of the system is compared for the three modeling techniques VQ, FCM (Fuzzy C means) clustering and MHMM for the recognition of isolated digits and simple continuous sentences in Tamil. Recognition accuracy (RA) is 81.5% with speeches of eight speakers considered for training and speeches of the remaining two speakers considered for testing for speaker independent isolated digit recognition system. Accuracy is found to be 91% and 87.5% for considering 90% of the data for training and 10% for testing for speaker independent isolated digit and continuous speech recognition systems respectively. Accuracy can be further enhanced by having an extensive database for creating models/templates. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) drawn between True Positive Rate and False Positive Rate is used to assess the performance of the system for HI. This system can be utilized to understand the speech uttered by any hearing impaired speaker and the system facilitates the provision of necessary assistance to them. It ultimately improves the social status of the hearing impaired people and their confidence level will be enhanced.