Isolated Word Recognition using MFCC and iterative Clustering Technique

1
Dr.A. Revathi, 2Pujitha Kothapalli, 2Arutla Sravya and 2C.Lakshmi Sravya
1
Professor ECE –School of EEE –SASTRA University
2
III year ECE –School of EEE –SASTRA University

ABSTRACT: dialling on mobile phones and many other day to day

The main goal of this paper is to develop the speaker
independent isolated word recognition system. The ability of a
reader to recognise the words that are written correctly, virtually
and effortlessly is defined as word recognition or isolated word
recognition. In this paper the recogniser consists of the three
phases –speech acquisition (collection of words) –feature
extraction using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (mfcc) -
classification and recognition phase respectively. Firstly the
input analog signal is converted into digital speech signal. From
the digital signal the acoustic features are extracted and stored in
the data base. These features are used for the computation of the
threshold values. In recognition phase the word uttered by an
independent speaker is recognised or rejected. Finally for the
different isolated words spoken by the different speakers training
and testing process has been done. This speech recognition is
used for speaker identification (speaker dependent), speech
recognition, security purposes etc.
Keywords: Speech recognition, frequency extraction,
Mel frequency Cepstral coefficient
INTRODUCTION:
Speech Communication has evolved to be efficient and
robust and it is clear that the route to computer based
speech recognition is the modelling of the human
system. Speech recognition is the ability of the program
or machine to identify the words or the voices spoken in
any language and converting them into the machine
readable format. Speech recognition systems can be
classified as isolated or continuous. Isolated word
recognition requires a brief pause between the each
word spoken whereas in continuous word recognition
we do not require as such. Isolated word recognition
includes the applications of driving controls for the
disabled people Speech recognition can further be
classified as speaker dependent and speaker
independent. In speaker independent system, set of
speeches taken for testing from the speakers whose
speeches are used for training. In speaker dependent,
speeches from the set of speakers for training and
testing are different. Speech recognition is embedded in
the voice activated routing systems at call centres, voice
applications. One of the important steps in speech
recognition system is to extract features. The feature
extraction deals with identifying the linguistic content
and discarding the background noise, emotion etc. The
main motto of the feature extraction is to find
discriminative and robust features in the acoustic data.
There are many techniques to extract the features like
Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC),
Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP), Linear Predictive
Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC) etc, We have chosen
mfcc for the following reasons
a) Mfcc are the most important features which are
required among various kinds of speech applications
b) It gives high accuracy results for clean speech.
In this paper a set of 7 words for both training and
testing phases are collected from 16 speakers (8 male
and 8 female) as input. Mel frequency Cepstral
coefficients are extracted from the speeches considered
for training and testing. The speech model is developed
by K-means clustering algorithm for each word. In
clustering method, clusters of size 256 is formed and
stored. On considering directly, a model is being
created for each word by performing certain training
and testing. For each model mean of minimum
distances are computed. The Word (speech) is classified
based on the selection of the model which produces
minimum of averages. Clusters of sizes 32, 64,128 can
also be formed in such a way that they capture the
characteristics of the training data distribution. The
Euclidean distance is small for most frequently
occurring vectors and large for the least frequently
occurring ones. As the cluster size increases execution
time increases.
SPEECH IDENTIFICATION:
This paper includes samples for the words enter, erase,
help, repeat, stop, start, yes from 16 speakers which
include 8 males and 8 females. Identification involves
two stages namely training and testing. In training stage
data base of the words is given as input to the system
and MFCC features are extracted. Then the iterative
clustering algorithm has been used to model the features
extracted.
MEL FREQUENCY CEPSTRAL
COEFFICIENT
The speech input is typically recorded at a sampling
rate of 16KHz.For minimizing the effect of aliasing in
analog -to-digital conversion this sample frequency is
chosen. These sampled signals capture all frequencies
upto 8 KHz which cover most energy of sounds that are
generated by human beings. The Feature extraction
block diagram is shown in Figure1.
A. Pre-Emphasis:
Pre-Emphasis is a very simple signal processing
method that increases the amplitude of the higher
frequency bands and decreases the amplitude of lower
frequency bands. It greatly reduces the noise in the
input signal .Here fixed first order high pass filter is
used to flatten the signal and make it less susceptible to
finite precision effects .A fixed or slowly adaptive
digital system is used in the pre-emphasizer. The most
widely used pre-emphasis network is the fixed first
order system and is given by (1)
(1)
Where y[n] is the first order high pass filter, ‘a’ is the
filter coefficient and ‘a’ generally lies in the interval
[0.95, 0.98] .We considered pre-emphasis coefficient
‘a’ as 0.97.
Input Speech
Mel-
Cepstrum
Pre-emphasis
Cepstrum
Frame Blocking
Hamming Windowing Mel Frequency
Wrapping
FFT
Figure 1 MFCC extraction
B. Frame Blocking:
Frames are the segments of pre-emphasized speech
signals with a duration of 20 -30 ms (here we consider
25 ms).The voice signal is divided into frames of size N
samples and the adjacent frames are separated by M
(M<N). Framing is done for the short time spectral
analysis.
C. Windowing :
In order to keep the continuity of the signal, each of the
above frames is multiplied by a hamming window. The
spectral distortion is minimized by using window to
taper the voice sample to zero at the both beginning and
end of the each frame. Generally
Where W[n] is the window function. The widely used
hamming window function is given as
for n = 0 to N-1
D. Fast Fourier Transform:
The process of converting time domain into frequency
domain is known as FFT. We perform FFT to obtain
magnitude frequency response of each frame. The
obtained output is a spectrum or periodogram.
E. Mel Frequency Wrapping:
The Mel frequency scale is linear frequency spacing
below 1000Hz and logarithmic spacing above 1000Hz.
One approach to simulate the Subjective spectrum is to
use a filter bank, spaced uniformly on the Mel scale.
The filter bank that is used has triangular band pass
frequency response, and the spacing as well as
bandwidth is determined by a constant Mel frequency
interval. The constant K which is number of Mel
spectrum coefficients is taken as 13.
F. Cepstrum:
The Cepstrum is a useful way of separating the source
and filter. It is a result of taking the inverse Fourier
transform of the logarithm of the estimated spectrum of
the signal. The Cepstral representation of the speech
spectrum provides a good representation of the local
spectral properties of the signal for the frame analysis
K-means Clustering Algorithm:

The process of partitioning a group of data points into a

small number of clusters is called clustering. K means is
one of the simplest unsupervised learning algorithms
that solve the well known clustering problem. Here the
procedure follows the simple and easy way to classify a
given data set through a certain number of clusters. Our
idea is to define k centres for each cluster. The steps
involved in K-means algorithm are as follows
a) The K points are placed into the space represented by
the objects that are being clustered. These points
represent the initial group centroids.
b) Each object is assigned to the group that has the
closest centroid
c) Recalculate the positions of the K centroids once all
the objects have been assigned
The conclusion matrix for the seven words is
developed and is represented as shown in the
TABLE 1. It shows that for the word enter out of
155 samples 146 are correctly determined giving
an accuracy of 94.19%. Out of all the words taken
the word ‘yes’ has got the highest accuracy of
80.64%. The accuracy of all the words is
represented in Figure 2
120

Recognition Accuracy
100
d)Repeat the above steps ‘b’ and ‘c’ until the centroids
no longer move .This produces a separation of objects 80
into groups from which the metric to be minimised 60
can be calculated.
40
20
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 0

The data base used includes the words enter,

erase, help, repeat, start, stop, yes from 8 male
Words
speakers and 8 female speakers. Each word was
uttered 25 times by the speaker out of which 16
were taken for training and 9 for testing. For the Figure 2 ACCURACY
output obtained from the testing of 7 words the
accuracy of the words are measured using Here in the above Bar Graph1 the words are taken
on abscissa and their accuracy on ordinate axis

TABLE 1. CONFUSION MATRIX

Enter Erase Help Repeat Start Stop Yes Accuracy

Enter 146 5 0 0 3 1 0 94.19%

Erase 0 154 0 1 0 0 0 99.35%

Help 4 1 146 0 0 4 0 94.19%

Repeat 1 25 1 126 0 2 0 80.64%

Start 0 0 0 1 147 8 0 94.23%

Stop 0 1 2 0 13 140 0 89.74%

Yes 0 0 0 0 0 0 156 100%

CONCLUSION:

This paper addresses mfcc feature extraction of

isolated word recognition using iterative clustering
technique. The speech model of cluster 256 is
created for the each word. In testing phase mean of
the minimum distance is computed for the each
model and the word is classified based on the
selection of model which produces minimum of
average. The average accuracy of all the words taken
is 93.14%.

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Parwinder Pal Singh, Pushpa Rani

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