Discrete Cepstrum Coefficients as Perceptual Features

Cepstrum coefficients are widely used as features for both speech and music. In this paper, the use of discrete cepstrum coefficients is considered, which are computed from sinusoidal peaks in the short time spectrum. These coefficients are very interesting as features for pattern recognition applications since they allow to represent spectra by points in a multidimensional vector space. A new Mel frequency warping method is proposed that allows to compute the spectral envelope on the Mel scale which, by contrast to current estimation techniques, does not rely on manually set parameters. Furthermore, the robustness and perceptual relevance of the coefficients are studied and improved.