Improved Frame-Wise Segmentation of Audio Signals for Smart Hearing Aid Using Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Clustering

Abstract

Labeling speech signals is a critical activity that cannot be overlooked in any of the early phases of designing a system based on speech technology. For this, an efficient particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based clustering algorithm is proposed to classify the speech classes, i.e., voiced, unvoiced, and silence. A sample of 10 signal waves is selected, and their audio features are extracted. The audio signals are then partitioned into frames, and each frame is classified by using the proposed PSO-based clustering algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using various performance metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity that are examined. Extensive experiments reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms the competitive algorithms. The average accuracy of the proposed algorithm is 97%, sensitivity is 98%, and specificity is 96%, which depicts that the proposed approach is efficient in detecting and classifying the speech classes.