Statistical modeling of speech Poincaré sections in combination of frequency analysis to improve speech recognition performance

Abstract

This paper introduces a combinational feature extraction approach to improve speech recognition systems. The main idea is to simultaneously benefit from some features obtained from Poincaré section applied to speech reconstructed phase space (RPS) and typical Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) which have a proved role in speech recognition field. With an appropriate dimension, the reconstructed phase space of speech signal is assured to be topologically equivalent to the dynamics of the speech production system, and could therefore include information that may be absent in linear analysis approaches. Moreover, complicated systems such as speech production system can present cyclic and oscillatory patterns and Poincaré sections could be used as an effective tool in analysis of such trajectories. In this research, a statistical modeling approach based on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) is applied to Poincaré sections of speech RPS. A final pruned feature set is obtained by applying an efficient feature selection approach to the combination of the parameters of the GMM model and MFCC-based features. A hidden Markov model-based speech recognition system and TIMIT speech database are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed feature set by conducting isolated and continuous speech recognition experiments. By the proposed feature set, 5.7% absolute isolated phoneme recognition improvement is obtained against only MFCC-based features.