Improvement of automatic speech recognition systems via nonlinear dynamical features evaluated from the recurrence plot of speech signals

The spectral-based features, typically used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, reject the phase information of speech signals. Thus, employing extra features, in which the phase of the signal is not rejected, may fill this gap. Embedding the speech signal in the Reconstructed Phase Space (RPS) and then extracting some useful features from it, is a recently considered approach in this field. In this paper, we will follow this approach by evaluating some useful features from the Recurrence Plot (RP) of the embedded speech signals in the RPS; the proposed features are evaluated via applying a two-dimensional wavelet transform to the resulted RP diagrams. The proposed features are examined in an ASR task alone and in combination with the traditional Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). For the second case, using English TIMIT corpus, 3.94% absolute classification accuracy improvement in the phoneme recognition accuracy rate, against using only the MFCC features is gained. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.