Classifier combination schemes in speech impediment therapy systems
Dénes Paczolay, László Felföldi, András Kocsor · 2005
In the therapy of the hearing impaired one of the central problems is the handling of the lack of proper auditive feedback which impedes the development of intelligible speech. Our Phonological Awareness Teaching System, the ”Speech-Master ” package, seeks to apply speech recognition technology to speech therapy [7, 8]. It provides a visual phonetic feedback for replacing the insufficient auditive feedback of the hearing impaired. We designed and implemented computer-aided training software that uses an effective phoneme recognizer and provides a realtime visual feedback in the form of flickering letters on calling pictures. The brightness of the letters is proportional to the speech recognizers output. The effectiveness of the therapy relies heavily on accurate phoneme recognition. Phoneme recognition is a special pattern recognition problem [1, 2, 11] where the continuously varying speech signal has to be mapped to a symbol of a phoneme. Because of the environmental conditions, simple recognition algorithms may have a weak classification performance, so various techniques such as