A parametric approach to vocal tract length normalization

24 December 2002

conference paper
Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Vol. 1 (15206149) , 346-348
https://doi.org/10.1109/icassp.1996.541103

Abstract

Differences in vocal tract size among individual speakers contribute to the variability of speech waveforms. The first-order effect of a difference in vocal tract length is a scaling of the frequency axis; a female speaker, for example, exhibits formants roughly 20% higher than the formants of from a male speaker, with the differences most severe in open vocal tract configurations. We describe a parametric method of normalisation which counteracts the effect of varied vocal tract length. The method is shown to be effective across a wide range of recognition systems and paradigms, but is particularly helpful in the case of a small amount of training data.

Keywords

FREQUENCY
LOUDSPEAKERS
TRAINING DATA
ITERATIVE DECODING
MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD DECODING
INTEGRATED CIRCUIT MODELING
ACOUSTIC TESTING
MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION
SPEECH RECOGNITION
ITERATIVE METHODS

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