Discrete wavelet transforms with multiclass SVM for phoneme recognition

Abstract

A phoneme recognition system based on Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs), is designed for multi-speaker continuous speech environments. Phonemes are divided into frames, and the DWTs are adopted, to obtain fixed dimensional feature vectors. For the multiclass SVM, the One-against-one method with the RBF kernel was implemented. To further improve the accuracies obtained, a priority scheme was added, to forecast the three most likely phonemes. After classification, all frames were again re-grouped, in order to evaluate the accuracy of the system according to the substitution, deletion and insertion errors. The percentage correct and accuracy, obtained from the designed phoneme recognition system, were 63.08% and 53.27% respectively. All tests were carried out on the TIMIT database. This phoneme recognition system is intended to be implemented on a dedicated chip, to improve the speed of the software implementation by approximately 100 times.