Blocking Black Area Method for Speech Segmentation

Speech segmentation is an important sub problem of automatic speech recognition. This research is concerned with the development of a continuous speech segmentation system using Bangla Language. This paper presents a dynamic thresholding algorithm to segment the continuous Bngla speech sentences into words/sub-words. The research uses Otsu’s method for dynamic thresholding and introduces a new approach, named blocking black area method to identify the voiced regions of the continuous speech in speech segmentation. The developed system has been justified with continuously spoken several Bangla sentences. To test the performance of the system, 100 Bangla sentences have been recorded from 5 (five) male speakers of different ages and 656 words have been presented in the 100 Bangla sentences. So, the speech database contains 500 Bangla sentences with 3280 words. All the algorithms and methods used in this research are implemented in MATLAB and the proposed system has been achieved the average segmentation accuracy of 90.58%. Keywords—Blocking Black Area; Boundary Detection; Dynamic Thresholding; Otsu’s Algorithm; Speech Segmentation