Speaker-independent vowel classification using hidden Markov models and LVQ2

A set of experiments in which the LVQ2 (learning vector quantization) algorithm of T. Kohonen et al (Proc. 1988 IEE Int. Conf. on Neural Networks, p.I-61-68, 1988) is used to generate vector codebooks for a discrete-observation hidden Markov model (HMM) classifier is described. Input feature vectors consist of single-frame linear predictive coding (LPC)-based cepstra and/or differenced cepstra. Classification accuracies using conventional k-means, class-specific k-means, and LVQ2 codebooks are compared for a 16-way speaker-independent vowel classification task. In contrast to speaker-dependent phonetic classification results previously published, no significant performance advantages are observed with LVQ2. These conflicting results are discussed relative to differences in the recognition tasks and the feature sets used. It is also argued that the single-observation Bayesian decision boundaries approximated by LVQ2 are nonoptimal for HMM-based classification involving multiple observations