Spoken word recognition with digital cochlea using 32 DSP-boards

A digital cochlea, which has a cascade of 16 filter sections, is realized by 32 commercially available DSP-boards. Each section consists of a travelling waves filter, a velocity transformation filter and a second filter. The artificial cochlea is also applied to spoken word recognition by feeding 16 output signals through a multi-channel A/D converter on PC. From experimental results, it is found that 50 Japanese words uttered by three speakers are recognized with 3% error This means the cochlea extracts feature parameters for speech recognition and shows the possibility of the signal processor for cochlear implants