Use of periodicity and jitter as speech recognition features

We investigate a class of features related to voicing parameters that indicate whether the vocal chords are vibrating. Features describing voicing characteristics of speech signals are integrated with an existing 38-dimensional feature vector consisting of first and second order time derivatives of the frame energy and of the cepstral coefficients with their first and second derivatives. HMM-based connected digit recognition experiments comparing the traditional and extended feature sets show that voicing features and spectral information are complementary and that improved speech recognition performance is obtained by combining the two sources of information.