Excitation Source and Vocal Tract System Based Acoustic Features for Detection of Nasals in Continuous Speech

The aim of the current study is to propose acoustic features for detection of nasals in continuous speech. Acoustic features that represent certain characteristics of speech production are extracted. Features representing excitation source characteristcs are extracted using zero frequency filtering method. Features representing vocal tract system characteristics are extracted using zero time windowing method. Feature sets are formed by combining certain subsets of the features mentioned above. These feature sets are evaluated for their representativeness of nasals in continuous speech in three different languages, namely, English, Hindi and Telugu. Results show that nasal detection is reliable and consistent across all the languages mentioned above.

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