Explorations in speaker normalization

Speaker normalization in speech perception

Acoustic-phonetic analysis of speech, made practical by the advent of the speech spectrograph (Koenig, Dunn & Lacy, 1946), prompted a number of foundational questions regarding the perception of speech because spectrograms showed that speech is highly variable both within and between talkers. Among early researchers, Liberman et al. (1967) focussed on within-talker variation in the acoustic cue...

Speaker normalization using HMM2

Speaker independent acoustic modeling using speaker normalization

This paper proposes a novel speaker-independent (SI) modeling for spontaneous speech data from multiple speakers. The SI acoustic model parameters are estimated by individual training for inter-speaker variability and for intraspeaker phonetically related variation in order to obtain a more accurate acoustic model. The linear transformation technique is used for the speaker normalization to ext...

Connectionist speaker normalization and adaptation

In a speaker-independent, large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, recognition accuracy varies considerably from speaker to speaker, and performance may be significantly degraded for outlier speakers such as nonnative talkers. In this paper, we explore supervised speaker adaptation and normalization in the MLP component of a hybrid hidden Markov model/ multilayer perceptron versi...

Speaker normalization in the MFCC domain

It has been shown in several recent publications that application of vocal tract normalization (VTN) is a successful method for improving the accuracy of speaker independent recognisers. We argue that VTN can be implemented in the filterbank domain and propose a model to achieve this. We show how the model can be implemented directly in the MFCC domain, where it may be viewed as a constrained v...