Combining mel frequency cepstral coefficients and fractal dimensions for automatic speech recognition

Abstract

Hidden Markov Models and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC's) are a sort of standard for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, but they fail to capture the nonlinear dynamics of speech that are present in the speech waveforms. The extra information provided by the nonlinear features could be especially useful when training data is scarce, or when the ASR task is very complex. In this work, the Fractal Dimension (FD) of the observed time series is combined with the traditional MFCC's in the feature vector in order to enhance the performance of two different ASR systems: the first one is a very simple one, with very few training examples, and the second one is a Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition System for Broadcast News. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.