Detection of Vowel Offset Point From Speech Signal

Abstract

Vowel regions play important role in various speech tasks, such as speech segmentation, speaker-verification, prosody modification and emotion conversion. The instants at which the onset and offset of vowel take place in the speech signal are known as vowel onset point and vowel offset point, respectively. Vowel regions start with the vowel onset point and end with the vowel offset point. In this letter, we have proposed two methods for determining the vowel offset points from the speech signal. The first method explores the combination of evidences from excitation source, spectral peaks and modulation spectrum for determining the vowel offset point. In the second method, spectral energy within glottal closure region is used for determining the vowel offset point. The proposed vowel offset point detection methods are evaluated on TIMIT database under clean and noisy environments.