Design of Manipuri Keywords Spotting System using HMM

This paper aims to discuss the implementation of phoneme based Manipuri Keyword Spotting System (MKWSS). Manipuri is a scheduled Indian language of Tibeto-Burman origin. Around 5 hours of read speech are collected from 4 male and 6 female speakers for development of database of MKWSS. The symbols of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)(revised in 2005) are used during the transcription of the data. A five state left to right Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with 32 mixture continuous density diagonal covariance Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) per state is used to build a model for each phonetic unit. We have used HMM tool kit (HTK), version 3.4 for modeling the system. The system can recognize 29 phonemes and a non-speech event (silence) and will detect the present keywords formed by these phonemes. Continuous Speech data have been collected from 5 males and 8 females for analysing the performance of the system. The performance of the system depends on the ability of detection of the keywords. An overall performance of 65.24% is obtained from the phoneme based MKWSS.