Arabic stop consonants characterisation and classification using the normalized energy in frequency bands

In general, speech is made with sequences of consonants (fricatives, nasals and stops), vowels and glides. The classification of the stop consonants remains one of the most challenging problems in speech recognition. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on the normalized energy in frequency bands in the release and closure phases in order to characterize and classify the Arabic stop consonants (/b/, /d/, /t/, /k/ and /q/) and to recognize the CV syllable. Classification experiments were performed using decision algorithms on stop consonants C and CV syllables extracted from an Arabic corpus. The results yielded to an overall stop consonants classification of 90.27% and syllables CV recognition upper than 90% for all stops.

[1]  Atiwong Suchato,et al.  Factors in classification of stop consonant place of articulation , 2005, INTERSPEECH.

[2]  Michael Kiefte,et al.  Temporal information in gated stop consonants , 2003, Speech Commun..

[3]  Kenneth N. Stevens,et al.  Models for the production and acoustics of stop consonants , 1993, Speech Commun..

[4]  S. Fuchs.  Articulatory correlates of the voicing contrast in alveolar obstruent production in German. , 2005 .

[5]  A. R. Jayan,et al.  Detection of burst onset landmarks in speech using rate of change of spectral moments , 2011, 2011 National Conference on Communications (NCC).

[6]  Abdelmajid Farchi,et al.  Energy bands and spectral cues for Arabic vowels recognition , 2016, Int. J. Speech Technol..

[7]  L. Lisker,et al.  A Cross-Language Study of Voicing in Initial Stops: Acoustical Measurements , 1964 .

[8]  M. Rothenberg.  Voice onset time versus articulatory modeling for stop consonants , 2009, Logopedics, phoniatrics, vocology.

[9]  C. L. Searle,et al.  Stop consonant discrimination based on human audition. , 1979, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[10]  F. Mitleb.  Voice onset time of Jordanian Arabic stops , 2001 .

[11]  Jan Van der Spiegel,et al.  Acoustic-phonetic features for the automatic classification of stop consonants , 2001, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process..

[12]  R. Damper,et al.  What can auditory neuroethology tell us about speech processing? , 1998, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[13]  Victor W. Zue,et al.  Acoustic Characteristics of Stop Consonants: A Controlled Study , 1976 .

[14]  A. Juneja,et al.  Segmentation of continuous speech using acoustic-phonetic parameters and statistical learning , 2002, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, 2002. ICONIP '02..

[15]  Victor Zue,et al.  Selecting acoustic features for stop consonant identification , 1983, ICASSP.

[16]  A. Liberman,et al.  Some Experiments on the Perception of Synthetic Speech Sounds , 1952 .

[17]  Sharlene A. Liu,et al.  Landmark detection for distinctive feature-based speech recognition , 1996 .

[18]  R De Mori,et al.  Speaker-independent consonant classification in continuous speech with distinctive features and neural networks. , 1993, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[19]  S Nittrouer,et al.  Children learn separate aspects of speech production at different rates: evidence from spectral moments. , 1995, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[20]  S. S. AlDahri.  A study of Voice Onset Time for Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing, Communication and Computing (ICSPCC 2012).

[21]  A. Liberman,et al.  The role of consonant-vowel transitions in the perception of the stop and nasal consonants. , 1954 .

[22]  P. Milenkovic,et al.  Statistical analysis of word-initial voiceless obstruents: preliminary data. , 1988, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[23]  Eleanor Chodroff,et al.  Burst spectrum as a cue for the stop voicing contrast in American English. , 2014, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[24]  Yousef Ajami Alotaibi,et al.  A crosslanguage survey of VOT values for stops (/d/, /t/) , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Intelligent Systems.

[25]  Shrikanth S. Narayanan,et al.  Closure duration analysis of incomplete stop consonants due to stop-stop interaction. , 2009, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[26]  A. Liberman,et al.  Some Cues for the Distinction Between Voiced and Voiceless Stops in Initial Position , 1958 .

[27]  D. Massaro,et al.  Integration of featural information in speech perception. , 1978, Psychological review.

[28]  A. Benguerel,et al.  Hindi Stop Consonants: an Acoustic and Fiberscopic Study , 1980, Phonetica.

[29]  S. Blumstein,et al.  Perceptual invariance and onset spectra for stop consonants in different vowel environments , 1976 .