An approach for automatic determination of break points in the speech waveform

Very often in signal analysis it is necessary to determine certain points in the signal waveform as anchor points for the processing. . This paper proposes a strategy to fmd automatically the voice onset for initial vowels, the burst point for voiceless and voiced stops and the release point for nasals. The presented approach exploits only the information inherent in the waveform of the signal by imitating the . hu~~n s~ill of abstraction. The procedure 1s divtded mto the following steps I . data compression by a) coding the original signal sampled ~t 16 kHz by its local extrema and the1r position in time . b) eliminating the silent parts of the Signal c) signal smoothing . 2. classification of the sy llables by therr type 3. special treatment for each type of syllable