Robust, n-best formant tracking
Philipp Schmid, Etienne Barnard · 1995
We describe a robust, N--best formant tracker. The 2 stage algorithm initially finds single formants or parts thereof. In the second stage a robust dynamic programming search with a wild card mechanism is employed to find the N best consistent interpretation of the initial formant information. The selection of the correct formant tracks is delayed until after the phonetic search, thus overcoming the lack of robustness of traditional formant trackers by delaying the final decision until after phonemic classification. 1. INTRODUCTION We are building a knowledge--based, segmental speech recognition system. Such systems have traditionally used cepstral, spectral or related features as a basis for segmentation and classification [1, 2]. However, from our experience with spectrogram reading, we know that formants are the single most important source of evidence for the classification of phonetic segments. Formants (especially their relative positioning) are the primary indicator for the cl...