Robust Dialect Identification System using Spectro-Temporal Gabor Features

Abstract

Automatic identification of dialects of a language is gaining popularity in the field of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The present work proposes an automatic dialect identification (ADI) system using 2D Gabor and spectral features. A comprehensive study of the five dialects of a Dravidian Kannada language has been taken up. Gabor filters representing spectro-temporal modulations attempt in emulation of the human auditory system concerning signal processing strategies. Hence, they are able to well perceive human voices in tern recognize dialectal variations effectively. Also, spectral features Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are derived. A single classifier based support vector machine (SVM) and ensemble based extreme random forest (ERF) classification methods are employed for recognition. The effectiveness of the Gabor features for ADI system is demonstrated with proposed Kannada dialect dataset along with a standard intonation variation in English (IViE) dataset for British English dialects. The Gabor features have shown better performance over MFCC features with both datasets. Better recognition performance of 88.75% and 99.16% is achieved with Kannada and IViE dialect datasets respectively. Proposed Gabor features have demonstrated better performances even under noisy conditions.