PURE Research Symposium Spring 2009

VOICE RECOGNITION USING AN HMM BASED DESIGN

Richard Muryanto and Nicholas Corso Mentored by: Sun Yu

Introduction

In engineering applications voice recognition systems has many diverse uses. Many schemes exist to implement voice recognition systemsDTWHMM... In this educational project we used Hidden Markov Models to implement a real-time voice recognition system.

System Overview

http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/doc/HTKBook21/img15.gif

Hidden Markov Models

Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are a way of modeling probabilities involving states of systems that can not directly observed.
HMMs can be characterized in terms of a few key parameters.

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/Research/Areas/Images/RT-Pict-HMM.png

Hidden Markov Models: Cont.

Classically there are three main algorithms associated to HMMs evaluation\decoding\learning

For an HMM based voice recognition system the Baum-Welch Algorithm is pivotal to the training of the system.

System Implementation

Pre-recorded Data

VAD

MFCC Feature Extraction

Training HMM (Baum-Welch)

Recorded Data

VAD

MFCC

Compute Likelihood

Display Output

ML Decision

VAD and MFCC

Voice Activity Detection (VAD) determines which parts of a voice signal are actual data and which are silence. The VAD algorithm used here utilizes the short-time energy, and zero crossing rate to decide if there is voice activity. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) was used to extract characteristic information from the speech vectors.

Observed Data
Ability for the System to Recognize Training Data

Possible Extensions

With more time the effects of environment on recognition rate could be investigated. With further investigation the effects of parameters in the Baum-Welch Algorithm could explored. A larger word set could be implemented.

References

Ramrez, J.; J. M. Grriz, J. C. Segura (2007). "Voice Activity Detection. Fundamentals and Speech Recognition System Robustness". in M. Grimm and K. Kroschel. Robust Speech Recognition and Understanding. pp. 122. Rabiner, Lawrence R. A Tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and Selected Applications in Speech Recognition in Proceedings of the IEEE. V.77, No.2, February 1989. Taoran Lu, Chao Zhang, Dan Zhu "Recognition by HMM"