A Wavelet Transform Based Scheme to Extract Speech Pitch and Formant Frequencies

Pitch and Formant frequencies are important features in speech processing applications. The period of the vocal cord's output for vowels is known as the pitch or the fundamental frequency, and formant frequencies are essentially resonance frequencies of the vocal tract. These features vary among different persons and even words, but they are within a certain frequency range. In practice, just the first three formants are enough for the most of speech processing. Feature extraction and classification are the main components of each speech recognition system. In this article, two wavelet based approaches are proposed to extract the mentioned features with help of the filter bank idea. By comparing the results of the presented feature extraction methods on several speech signals, it was found out that the wavelet transform has a good accuracy compared to the cepstrum method and it has no sensitivity to noise. In addition, several fuzzy based classification techniques for speech processing are reviewed.