A study on pitch variation on the use of DWT with SVM for speaker independent phoneme recognition

Abstract

A phoneme recognition system based on Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWTs) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs), is designed for speaker-independent continuous speech environments. This research studies the pitch variation present in a speech signal, due to gender difference, and whether an increase is obtained if male and female speakers are considered separately. The results obtained show, that the designed system, is robust to pitch variation present in speech signals. On average, the same accuracies are obtained for the case when all speakers are considered, and for the cases when the male and female speakers are considered separately. The percentage correct and accuracy, obtained from the designed phoneme recognition system, when all speakers were considered, were 64.38% and 55.08% respectively. All tests were carried out on the TIMIT database. This study has been carried out to analyse the performance of the system before actually moving on to the implementation of a dedicated chip, which is intended to enhance the speed performance of the system.