Statistical Descriptors of Mel-bands Spectral Energy Features with Feature Reduction Application for Robust Accent Recognition in Malaysian English
Abstract
To date, Malaysian English (MalE) accents arises from different ethnics of its populace are scarcely investigated using empirical methods that give a decisive conclusion to treat MalE as either uniform or non-uniform variety. The popularly used Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) as feature extractor fails to perform well under noisy conditions. This paper proposes two new methods and noise less-susceptible feature extractors to mitigate the deficiency of MFCC. Statistical descriptors of Mel-bands spectral energy (MBSE) is an enhancement of traditional filter-bank analysis, however, increases fourfold as much the feature size. This issue is tackled by proposing a transformation using principle component analysis to generate a new PCA-MBSE feature set. Experimental results indicated promising accuracy rates of 94.6% and 89.9% to recognize between the Malay, Chinese and Indian accents of MalE speech for male and female datasets respectively. Under severe noisy conditions, however, MFCC features started to deteriorate faster than MBSE-based features. PCA-MBSE features showed the most robust quality where its performance was just slightly deteriorated by 17.1% (male dataset) and 13.6% (female dataset) as compared to MBSE of 33.1%and 31.3% while worst results of deterioration were obtained for MFCC of 35.7% and 36.8% for the male and female datasets respectively.
Keywords Accent Recognition, Malaysian English, Mel-bands Spectral Energy, Mel-frequency Cepstral coefficients, Principle Component Analysis, K-Nearest Neighbors
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