N. Esfandian - Department of Electrical Engineering, Qaemshahr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qaemshahr, Iran
K. Hosseinpour - Department of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Aryan Institute of Higher Education and Technology, Babol, Iran

In this paper, a new feature extraction method is presented based on spectro-temporal representation of speech signal for phoneme classification. In the proposed method, an artificial neural network approach is used to cluster spectro-temporal domain. Self-organizing map artificial neural network (SOM) was applied to clustering of features space. Scale, rate and frequency were used as spatial information of each point and the magnitude component was used as similarity attribute in clustering algorithm. Three mechanisms were considered to select attributes in spectro-temporal features space. Spatial information of clusters, the magnitude component of samples in spectro-temporal domain and the average of the amplitude components of each cluster points were considered as secondary features. The proposed features vectors were used for phonemes classification. The results demonstrate that a significant improvement is obtained in classification rate of different sets of phonemes in comparison to previous clustering-based methods. The obtained results of new features indicate the system error is compensated in all vowels and consonants subsets in compare to weighted K-means clustering.

Spectro-temporal Features, Auditory Model, Feature Extraction, Clustering, Artificial Neural Network