EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

A New Spectral Transformation for Speaker Normalization

Pierre L. Dognin, Amro El-Jaroudi

University of Pittsburgh, USA

This paper proposes a new spectral transformation for speaker normalization. We use the Bilinear Transformation (BLT) to introduce a new frequency warping resulting from a mapping of a prototype Band-Pass (BP) filter into a general BP filter. This new transformation called "Band-Pass Transform" (BPT) offers two degrees of freedom enabling complex warpings of the frequency axis and different from previous works with BLT. A procedure based on the Nelder-Mead algorithm is proposed to estimate the BPT parameters. Our experimental results include a detailed study of the performance of the BPT compared to other VTLN methods for a subset of speakers and results on large test sets. BPT performs better than other VTLN methods and offers a gain of 1.13% absolute on Hub-5 English Eval01 set.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Dognin, Pierre L. / El-Jaroudi, Amro (2003): "A new spectral transformation for speaker normalization", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 1865-1868.