Robust classification of stop consonants using auditory-based speech processing

In this work, a feature-based system for the automatic classification of stop consonants, in speaker independent continuous speech, is reported. The system uses a new auditory-based speech processing front-end that is based on the biologically rooted property of average localized synchrony detection (ALSD). It incorporates new algorithms for the extraction and manipulation of the acoustic-phonetic features that proved, statistically, to be rich in their information content. The experiments are performed on stop consonants extracted from the TIMIT database with additive white Gaussian noise at various signal-to-noise ratios. The obtained classification accuracy compares favorably with previous work. The results also showed a consistent improvement of 3% in the place detection over the Generalized Synchrony Detector (GSD) system under identical circumstances on clean and noisy speech. This illustrates the superior ability of the ALSD to suppress the spurious peaks and produce a consistent and robust formant (peak) representation.