The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences (한국전자통신학회논문지)

Korea Institute of Electronic Communication Science (한국전자통신학회)
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Comparison of Male/Female Speech Features and Improvement of Recognition Performance by Gender-Specific Speech Recognition

남성과 여성의 음성 특징 비교 및 성별 음성인식에 의한 인식 성능의 향상

  • 이창영 (동서대학교 정보시스템공학부)
  • Received : 2010.10.01
  • Accepted : 2010.12.10
  • Published : 2010.12.31
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Abstract

In an effort to improve the speech recognition rate, we investigated performance comparison between speaker-independent and gender-specific speech recognitions. For this purpose, 20 male and 20 female speakers each pronounced 300 isolated Korean words and the speeches were divided into 4 groups: female, male, and two mixed genders. To examine the validity for the gender-specific speech recognition, Fourier spectrum and MFCC feature vectors averaged over male and female speakers separately were examined. The result showed distinction between the two genders, which supports the motivation for the gender-specific speech recognition. In experiments of speech recognition rate, the error rate for the gender-specific case was shown to be less than50% compared to that of the speaker-independent case. From the obtained results, it might be suggested that hierarchical recognition of gender and speech recognition might yield better performance over the current method of speech recognition.

음성인식에서의 인식률 향상을 위한 노력의 일환으로서, 본 논문에서는 성별을 구분하지 않는 일반적 화자독립 음성인식과 성별에 따른 음성인식의 성능을 비교하는 연구를 수행하였다. 실험을 위해 남녀 각 20명의 화자로 하여금 각각 300단어를 발성하게 하고, 그 음성 데이터를 여성/남성/혼성A/혼성B의 네 그룹으로 나누었다. 우선, 성별 음성인식에 대한 근거의 타당성을 파악하기 위하여 음성 신호의 주파수 분석 및 MFCC 특징벡터들의 성별 차이를 조사하였다. 그 결과, 성별 음성인식의 동기를 뒷받침할 정도의 두드러진 성별 차이가 확인되었다. 음성인식을 수행한 결과, 성을 구분하지 않는 일반적인 화자독립의 경우에 비해 성별 음성인식에서의 오류율이 절반 이하로 떨어지는 것으로 나타났다. 이로부터, 성 인식과 성별 음성인식을 계층적으로 수행함으로써 화자독립의 인식률을 높일 수 있을 것으로 사료된다.

Keywords

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