Optimal Wavelets for Speech Signal Representations

Abstract

It is well known that in many speech processing applications, speech signals are characterized by their voiced and unvoiced components. Voiced speech components contain dense frequency spectrum with many harmonics. The periodic or semi-periodic nature of voiced signals lends itself to Fourier Processing. Unvoiced speech contains many high frequency components and thus resembles random noise. Several methods for voiced and unvoiced speech representations that utilize wavelet processing have been developed. These methods seek to improve the accuracy of wavelet-based speech signal representations using adaptive wavelet techniques, superwavelets, which uses a linear combination of adaptive wavelets, gaussian methods and a multi-resolution sinusoidal transform approach to mention a few. This paper addresses the relative performance of these wavelet methods and evaluates the usefulness of wavelet processing in speech signal representations. In addition, this paper will also address some of the hardware considerations for the wavelet methods presented.

Keywords

• super wavelets
• Speech recognition
• speech coding
• quadrature spline wavelets
• adaptive wavelets