Vowel Lab III: Vowel Classification

Classification is ubiquitous. The ability to recognize and categorize things based on their features is fundamental to human cognition; a large part of our ability to understand and deal with the world around us is a result of our ability to classify things. Similarly, we want to design systems that are capable of recognition and categorization. We want vending machines to be able to recognize the bills inserted into the bill changer. We want internet search engines to classify web pages based on their relevance to our query. We want computers that can recognize and classify speech properly so that we can interact with them naturally. We want medical systems that can classify unusual regions of an x-ray as cancerous or benign. We want high speed digital communication modems that can determine the sequence of, say, 64-ary signals that were transmitted. There is a vast array of applications for classification. In this lab, we will build upon the foundation that we developed in Lab 8 to actually perform classification of vowel sounds. We will explore a couple of ways of measuring the performance of a classifier (i.e., a system that performs classification), and we will relate these performance measures back to the ones that we introduced in Lab 8 for characterizing different feature sets.