ISCA Archive Eurospeech 2001
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 2001

Vocal tract normalization equals linear transformation in cepstral space

Michael Pitz, Sirko Molau, Ralf Schlüter, Hermann Ney

We show that vocal tract normalization (VTN) frequency warping results in a linear transformation in the cepstral domain. For the special case of a piece-wise linear warping function, the transformation matrix is analytically calculated. This approach enables us to compute the Jacobian determinant of the transformation matrix, which allows the normalization of the probability distributions used in speaker-normalization for automatic speech recognition.