Feature Extraction Based on Speech Attractors in the Reconstructed Phase Space for Automatic Speech Recognition Systems

Abstract

In this paper, a feature extraction (FE) method is proposed that is comparable to the traditional FE methods used in automatic speech recognition systems. Unlike the conventional spectral-based FE methods, the proposed method evaluates the similarities between an embedded speech signal and a set of predefined speech attractor models in the reconstructed phase space (RPS) domain. In the first step, a set of Gaussian mixture models is trained to represent the speech attractors in the RPS. Next, for a new input speech frame, a posterior-probability-based feature vector is evaluated, which represents the similarity between the embedded frame and the learned speech attractors. We conduct experiments for a speech recognition task utilizing a toolkit based on hidden Markov models, over FARSDAT, a well-known Persian speech corpus. Through the proposed FE method, we gain 3.11% absolute phoneme error rate improvement in comparison to the baseline system, which exploits the mel-frequency cepstral coefficient FE method.