HMM based language identification from speech utterances of popular indic languages using spectral and prosodic features

Abstract

Language identification system (LID) is a system which automatically recognises the languages of short-term duration of unknown utterance of human beings. It recognises the discriminate features and reveals the language of utterance that belongs to. In this paper, we consider concatenated feature vectors of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Pitch for designing LID. We design a reference model one for each language using 14-dimensional feature vectors using Hidden Markov model (HMM) then evaluate against all reference models of listed languages. The likelihood value of test sample feature vectors given in the evaluation is considered to decide the language of unknown utterance of test speech sample. In this paper we consider seven Indian languages for the experimental set up and the performance of system is evaluated. The average performance of the system is 89.31% and 90.63% for three states and four states HMM for 3sec test speech utterances respectively and also it is also observed that the system gives significant results with 3sec test speech for four state HMM even though we follow simple procedure.