On the effects of varying filter bank parameters on isolated word recognition

The vast majority of commercially available isolated word recognizers use a filter bank analysis as the front end processing for recognition. It is not well understood how the parameters of different filter banks (e.g., number of filters, types of filters, filter spacing, etc.) affect recognizer performance. In this paper we present results of performance evaluation of several types of filter bank analyzers in a speaker trained isolated word recognition test using dialed-up telephone line recordings. We have studied both DFT (discrete Fourier transform) and direct form implementations of the filter banks. We have also considered uniform and nonuniform filter spacings. The results indicate that the best performance (highest word accuracy) is obtained by both a 15-channel uniform filter bank and a 13-channel nonuniform filter bank (with channels spacing along a critical band scale). The performance of a 7-channel critical band filter bank is almost as good as that of the two best filter banks. In comparison to a conventional linear predictive coding (LPC) word recognizer, the performance of the best filter bank recognizers was, on average, several percent worse than that of an eighth-order LPC-based recognizer. A discussion as to why some filter banks performed better than others, and why the LPC-based system did the best, is given in this paper.