Vector Quantizer Based Speaker Normalization for Continuos Speech Recognition
Ok-Keun Shin · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea · 2004
Proposed is a speaker normalization method based on vector quantizer for continuous speech recognition (CSR) system in which no acoustic information is made use of. The proposed method, which is an improvement of the previously reported speaker normalization scheme for a simple digit recognizer, builds up a canonical codebook by iteratively training the codebook while the size of codebook is increased after each iteration from a relatively small initial size. Once the codebook established, the warp factors of speakers are estimated by comparing exhaustively the warped versions of each speaker's utterance with the codebook. Two sets of phones are used to estimate the warp factors: one, a set of vowels only. and the other, a set composed of all the Phonemes. A Piecewise linear warping function which corresponds to the estimated warp factor is adopted to warp the power spectrum of the utterance. Then the warped feature vectors are extracted to be used to train and to test the speech recognizer. The effectiveness of the proposed method is investigated by a set of recognition experiments using the TIMIT corpus and HTK speech recognition tool kit. The experimental results showed comparable recognition rate improvement with the formant based warping method.