Speech Recognition Using Monophone and Triphone Based Continuous Density Hidden Markov Models

Speech Recognition is a process of transcribing speech to text. Phoneme based modeling is used where in each phoneme is represented by Continuous Density Hidden Markov Model. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are extracted from speech signal, delta and double-delta features representing the temporal rate of change of features are added which considerably improves the recognition accuracy. Each phoneme is represented by tristate Hidden Markov Model(HMM) with each state being represented by Continuous Density Gaussian model. As single mixture gaussian model do not represent the distribution of feature vectors in a better way, mixture splitting is performed successively in stages to eight mixture gaussian components. The multi-gaussian monophone models so generated do not capture all the variations of a phone with respect to its context, context dependent triphone models are build and the states are tied using decision tree based clustering. It is observed that recognition accuracy increases as the number of mixture components is increased and it works well for tied-state triphone based HMMs for large vocabulary. TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus is used for implementation. Recognition accuracy is also tested for our recorded speech. Keywords—MFCC, Hidden Markov Model(HMM), Hidden Markov Model Tool Kit(HTK), Monophones, Tied-State Triphones.