Application of novelty filter to segmentation of speech

Temporal segmentation of the acoustic wave-form into distinct, recognizable units is an unavoidable task in machine recognition of continuous speech. In this paper it is demonstrated that a vector space projector named Novelty Filter can be used to perform the segmentation of speech into phonemes. A Spectral decomposition of the speech waveform, performed by an analog filter bank, is continuously analyzed at regular sampling intervals for its degree of "novelty" with respect to a set of stationary prototype phonemes. The distance of the sampled vectors from the subspace spanned by all the prototype vectors is given by the Novelty Filter, and the maxima of this distance then indicate the transition regions between successive phonemes.