Auditory ERB like admissible wavelet packet features for TIMIT phoneme recognition

Abstract

In recent years wavelet transform has been found to be an effective tool for time–frequency analysis. Wavelet transform has been used as feature extraction in speech recognition applications and it has proved to be an effective technique for unvoiced phoneme classification. In this paper a new filter structure using admissible wavelet packet is analyzed for English phoneme recognition. These filters have the benefit of having frequency bands spacing similar to the auditory Equivalent Rectangular Bandwidth (ERB) scale. Central frequencies of ERB scale are equally distributed along the frequency response of human cochlea. A new sets of features are derived using wavelet packet transform's multi-resolution capabilities and found to be better than conventional features for unvoiced phoneme problems. Some of the noises from NOISEX-92 database has been used for preparing the artificial noisy database to test the robustness of wavelet based features.