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Phonetic segmentation using multiple speech features

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Abstract

In this paper we propose a method for improving the performance of the segmentation of speech waveforms to phonetic units. The proposed method is based on the well known Viterbi time-alignment algorithm and utilizes the phonetic boundary predictions from multiple speech parameterization techniques. Specifically, we utilize the most appropriate, with respect to boundary type, phone transition position prediction as initial point to start Viterbi time-alignment for the prediction of the successor phonetic boundary. The proposed method was evaluated on the TIMIT database, with the exploitation of several, well known in the area of speech processing, Fourier-based and wavelet-based speech parameterization algorithms. The experimental results for the tolerance of 20 milliseconds indicated an improvement of the absolute segmentation accuracy of approximately 0.70%, when compared to the baseline speech segmentation scheme.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wire Communications Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Patras, Rion-Patras, 26500, Greece

    Iosif Mporas, Todor Ganchev & Nikos Fakotakis

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  1. Iosif Mporas
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  2. Todor Ganchev
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  3. Nikos Fakotakis
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Correspondence to Todor Ganchev.

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Mporas, I., Ganchev, T. & Fakotakis, N. Phonetic segmentation using multiple speech features. Int J Speech Technol 11, 73–85 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-009-9038-4

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