Automatic speech segmentation using throat-acoustic correlation coefficients

Abstract

This work considers one of the approaches to the solution of the task of discrete speech signal automatic segmentation. The aim of this work is to construct such an algorithm which should meet the following requirements: segmentation of a signal into acoustically homogeneous segments, high accuracy and segmentation speed, unambiguity and reproducibility of segmentation results, lack of necessity of preliminary training with the use of a special set consisting of manually segmented signals. Development of the algorithm which corresponds to the given requirements was conditioned by the necessity of formation of automatically segmented speech databases that have a large volume. One of the new approaches to the solution of this task is viewed in this article. For this purpose we use the new type of informative features named TAC-coefficients (Throat-Acoustic Correlation coefficients) which provide sufficient segmentation accuracy and effi- ciency.

Keywords

• TAC coefficients
• throat microphone
• multisensory speech processing
• speech segmentation
• speech recognition
• speech synthesis
• multimodal recognition
• acoustic sub-word units
• joint analysis of throat and acoustic microphone signals
• correlation analysis