A parametric approach to vocal tract length normalization

Author

Eide, Ellen ; Gish, Herbert

Author_Institution

BBN Syst. & Technol. Corp., Cambridge, MA, USA

Volume

1

fYear

1996

fDate

7-10 May 1996

Firstpage

346

Abstract

Differences in vocal tract size among individual speakers contribute to the variability of speech waveforms. The first-order effect of a difference in vocal tract length is a scaling of the frequency axis; a female speaker, for example, exhibits formants roughly 20% higher than the formants of from a male speaker, with the differences most severe in open vocal tract configurations. We describe a parametric method of normalisation which counteracts the effect of varied vocal tract length. The method is shown to be effective across a wide range of recognition systems and paradigms, but is particularly helpful in the case of a small amount of training data

Keywords

acoustic signal processing; parameter estimation; speech processing; speech recognition; Helmholtz resonator; female speaker; first-order effect; formants; frequency axis scaling; male speaker; open vocal tract configurations; parametric method; speech recognition systems; speech waveforms variability; training data; vocal tract length normalization; vocal tract size; Acoustic testing; Frequency; Integrated circuit modeling; Iterative decoding; Iterative methods; Loudspeakers; Maximum likelihood decoding; Maximum likelihood estimation; Speech recognition; Training data;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. ICASSP-96. Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Atlanta, GA

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3192-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.1996.541103

Filename

541103