Spotting and Recognition of Consonant-Vowel Units from Continuous Speech Using Accurate Detection of Vowel Onset Points

In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to spotting and recognition of consonant-vowel (CV) units from continuous speech using accurate detection of vowel onset points (VOPs). Existing methods for VOP detection suffer from lack of high accuracy, spurious VOPs, and missed VOPs. The proposed VOP detection is designed to overcome most of the shortcomings of the existing methods and provide accurate detection of VOPs for improving the performance of spotting and recognition of CV units. The proposed method for VOP detection is carried out in two levels. At the first level, VOPs are detected by combining the complementary evidence from excitation source, spectral peaks, and modulation spectrum. At the second level, hypothesized VOPs are verified (genuine or spurious), and their positions are corrected using the uniform epoch intervals present in the vowel regions. The spotted CV units are recognized using a two-stage CV recognizer. Two-stage CV recognition system consists of hidden Markov models (HMMs) at the first stage for recognizing the vowel category of a CV unit and support vector machines (SVMs) for recognizing the consonant category of a CV unit at the second stage. Performance of spotting and recognition of CV units from continuous speech is evaluated using Telugu broadcast news speech corpus.