Formant Analysis of Bangla Vowel for Automatic Speech Recognition

Abstract

To provide new technological benefits to the mass people, nowadays, regional and local language recognition draws attention to the researchers. Similarly to other languages, Bangla speech recognition scheme is demandable. A formant is considered as the resonance frequency of vocal tract. Formant frequencies play an important role for the purpose of automatic speech recognition, due to its noise robust characteristics. In this paper, Bangla vowels are investigated to acquire formant frequencies and its corresponding bandwidth from continuous Bangla sentences, which are considered as potential parameters for wide voice applications. For the purpose of formant analysis, cepstrum based formant estimation and Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) techniques are used. In order to acquire formant characteristics, enrich continuous sentences and widely available Bangla language corpus namely " SHRUTI " is considered. Intensive experimentation is carried out to determine formant characteristics (frequency and bandwidth) of Bangla vowels for both male and female speakers. Finally, vowel recognition accuracy of Bangla language is reported considering first three formants.. KEYWORDS Automatic speech recognition, Bangla vowel, Formant, Linear Predictive Coding.