Broad Phoneme Classification Using Signal Based Features

Speech is the most efficient and popular means of human communication Speech is produced as a sequence of phonemes. Phoneme recognition is the first step performed by automatic speech recognition system. The state-of-the-art recognizers use mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) features derived through short time analysis, for which the recognition accuracy is limited. Instead of this, here broad phoneme classification is achieved using features derived directly from the speech at the signal level itself. Broad phoneme classes include vowels, nasals, fricatives, stops, approximants and silence. The features identified useful for broad phoneme classification are voiced/unvoiced decision, zero crossing rate (ZCR), short time energy, most dominant frequency, energy in most dominant frequency, spectral flatness measure and first three formants. Features derived from short time frames of training speech are used to train a multilayer feedforward neural network based classifier with manually marked class label as output and classification accuracy is then tested. Later this broad phoneme classifier is used for broad syllable structure prediction which is useful for applications such as automatic speech recognition and automatic language identification.