ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1995
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1995

Phoneme transition detection and broad classification using a simple model based on the function of onset detector cells found in the cochlear nucleus

Andrew C. Morris, José M. Pardo

We present a simple model for onset and offset detection which is based on the broad functionality of onset cells in the cochlear nucleus, the first auditory brain centre. We show that the clusters of transition events detected by this model in the spectrogram can be used to both locate and broad-classify phoneme transitions. A preliminary Isolated Word Recognition system is described which bases recognition solely on evidence from detected transition clusters together with short spectral samples taken from each cluster centre. Recognition performance is compared with that for two other IWR systems of a similar complexity which process the whole signal uniformly.