Speech Feature Computations for Visual Speech Articulation Training

SPEECH FEATURE COMPUTATIONS FOR VISUAL SPEECH ARTICULATION TRAINING Stefan Auberg Old Dominion University, 1996 Director: Dr. Stephen A. Zahorian A new version of the Visual Speech Articulation Training Aid was implemented which provides real-time visual feedback for speech articulation training. This version was migrated to a Windows Multimedia PC from a previous version which used a Personal Computer (PC) system and additional specialized and expensive custom hardware. This new version will make the system more available to schools and private users. A new method was developed for computing spectral/temporal features which characterize the speech sounds. In addition to the typical frame-based spectral analysis parameters, the new method represents temporal changes of the spectrum with a small number of features. The flexible method implemented can easily be adapted to compute features for a wide range of speech processing tasks. Linguistically-based distinctive features were also investigated as candidate features for the visual display system. Some experimental results are given for vowels using the new system. SPEECH FEATURE COMPUTATION FOR VISUAL SPEECH ARTICULATION TRAINING