Experiments on speaker-independent recognition of hand-segmented French vowels

This paper addresses the problem of recognizing hand-segmented vowel phonemes in isolated words pronounced by different speakers. Overcoming variation in the spectral properties of similar vowels produced by different speakers (vowel normalization) is a subproblem in the goal of large vocabulary, speaker-independent speech recognition. Two normalization techniques are compared in a series of recognition experiments on the 15 oral and nasal French vowel phonemes.