Explicit, N-best formant features for vowel classification

We demonstrate the use of explicit formant features for vowel and semi-vowel classification. The formant trajectories are approximated by either three line segments or Legendre polynomials. Together with formant amplitude, formant bandwidth, pitch, and segment duration, these formant features form a compact feature representation which performs as well (71.8%) as a cepstral-based feature representation (71.6%). The combination of the formant and cepstral feature improves the accuracy further to 73.4%. Additionally, we outline future experiments using our robust, N-best formant tracker.

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