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A mixture model approach for formant tracking and the robustness of student's-t distribution

Sundar, Harshavardhan and Seelamantula, Chandra Sekhar and Sreenivas, Thippur V (2012) A mixture model approach for formant tracking and the robustness of student's-t distribution. In: IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 20 (10). pp. 2626-2636.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2012.2209418

Abstract

We address the problem of robust formant tracking in continuous speech in the presence of additive noise. We propose a new approach based on mixture modeling of the formant contours. Our approach consists of two main steps: (i) Computation of a pyknogram based on multiband amplitude-modulation/frequency-modulation (AM/FM) decomposition of the input speech; and (ii) Statistical modeling of the pyknogram using mixture models. We experiment with both Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and Student's-t mixture model (tMM) and show that the latter is robust with respect to handling outliers in the pyknogram data, parameter selection, accuracy, and smoothness of the estimated formant contours. Experimental results on simulated data as well as noisy speech data show that the proposed tMM-based approach is also robust to additive noise. We present performance comparisons with a recently developed adaptive filterbank technique proposed in the literature and the classical Burg's spectral estimator technique, which show that the proposed technique is more robust to noise.

Item Type: Journal Article
Publication: IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
Publisher: IEEE-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc
Additional Information: Copyright of this article belongs to IEEE-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc.
Keywords: Formant Tracking; Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM); Multimodal Density Estimation; Statistical Mixture Modeling; Student's-t Mixture Model (tMM)
Department/Centre: Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Communication Engineering
Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Engineering
Date Deposited: 15 Feb 2013 12:16
Last Modified: 15 Feb 2013 12:16
URI: http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/45366

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