On Wavelet Transform Based Feature Extraction for Speech Recognition Application

This paper proposes a feature extraction method using wavelet transform for speech recognition. Speech recognition system generally carries out the recognition task based on speech features which are usually obtained via time-frequency representations such as Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and Linear Predictive Coding(LPC). In some respects these methods may not be suitable for representing highly complex speech characteristics. They map the speech features with same may not frequency resolutions at all frequencies. Wavelet transform overcomes some of these limitations. Wavelet transform captures signal with fine time resolutions at high frequencies and fine frequency resolutions at low frequencies, which may present a significant advantage when analyzing highly localized speech events. Based on this motivation, this paper investigates the effectiveness of wavelet transform for feature extraction of wavelet transform for feature extraction focused on enhancing speech recognition. The proposed method is implemented using Sampled Continuous Wavelet Transform (SCWT) and its performance is tested on a speaker-independent isolated word recognizer that discerns 50 Korean words. In particular, the effect of mother wavelet employed and number of voices per octave on the performance of proposed method is investigated. Also the influence on the size of mother wavelet on the performance of proposed method is discussed. Throughout the experiments, the performance of proposed method is discussed. Throughout the experiments, the performance of proposed method is compared with the most prevalent conventional method, MFCC (Mel0frequency Cepstral Coefficient). The experiments show that the recognition performance of the proposed method is better than that of MFCC. But the improvement is marginal while, due to the dimensionality increase, the computational loads of proposed method is substantially greater than that of MFCC.