Vowel Onset Point Detection Using Source, Spectral Peaks, and Modulation Spectrum Energies

Vowel onset point (VOP) is the instant at which the onset of vowel takes place during speech production. There are significant changes occurring in the energies of excitation source, spectral peaks, and modulation spectrum at the VOP. This paper demonstrates the independent use of each of these three energies in detecting the VOPs. Since each of these energies represents a different aspect of speech production, it may be possible that they contain complementary information about the VOP. The individual evidences are therefore combined for detecting the VOPs. The error rates measured as the ratio of missing and spurious to the total number of VOPs evaluated on the sentences taken from the TIMIT database are 6.92%, 8.8%, 6.13%, and 4.0% for source, spectral peaks, modulation spectrum, and combined information, respectively. The performance of the combined method for VOP detection is improved by 2.13% compared to the best performing individual VOP detection method.