Formant tracking based on phoneme information

• Main Authors: Lee, Minkyu, Moebius, Bernd, Olive, Joseph Philip, Van Santen, Jan Pieter
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 09.09.2003

The invention relates generally to the field of speech signal processing, and more particularly, concerns formant tracking based on phoneme information in speech analysis. A method and system for selecting formant trajectories based on input speech and corresponding text data. The input speech is analyzed to obtain formant candidates for the respective time frame. The text data corresponding to the input speech is converted into a sequence of phonemes which are then time aligned such that each phoneme is temporally labeled with a corresponding segment of the input speech. Nominal formant frequencies are assigned to a center timing point of each phoneme and target formant trajectories are generated for each time frame by interpolating the nominal formant frequencies between adjacent phonemes. For each time frame, at least one formant candidate that is closest to the corresponding target formant trajectories is selected according to a minimum cost factor. The selected formant candidates are output for storage or further processing in subsequent speech applications.