Amplitude spectrum correction to improve speech signal classification quality

Abstract

The speech signal can be described by three key elements: the excitation signal, the impulse response of the vocal tract, and a system that represents the impact of speech production through human lips. The primary carrier of semantic content in speech is primarily influenced by the characteristics of the vocal tract. Nonetheless, when it comes to parameterization coefficients, the irregular periodicity of the glottal excitation is a significant factor that leads to notable variations in the values of the feature vectors, resulting in disruptions in the amplitude spectrum with the appearance of ripples. In this study, a method is suggested to mitigate this phenomenon. To achieve this goal, inverse filtering was used to estimate the excitation and transfer functions of the vocal tract. Subsequently, using the derived parameterisation coefficients, statistical models for individual Polish phonemes were established as mixtures of Gaussian distributions. The impact of these corrections on the classification accuracy of Polish vowels was then investigated. The proposed modification of the parameterisation method fulfils the expectations, the scatter of feature vector values was reduced.