Itt Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.

Itt Corporation

Joe A Naylor

Lawrence G Bahler

William Y Huang

An apparatus and method for automatic continuous-speech recognition is disclosed. The recognition function for a speaker-dependent continuous-speech recognition (CSR) system is performed on a (PCMCIA) card, which includes a DSP, Codec, and memory. All of the processing performed by the CPU, DSP, and special DTW chip in prior art systems are performed in the single DSP on the PCMCIA card. Recognition results computed on the card are uploaded to the host computer application (for command interpretation and processing), via the PCMCIA interface. The host computer may comprise a personal computer, making this invention particularly well-suited for use in military or other such operations which require light-weight portable computers.

Apparatus and method for continuous speech recognition on a PCMCIA card

A method for recognizing spoken utterances of a speaker is disclosed, the method comprising the steps of providing a database of labeled speech data; providing a prototype of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) definition to define the characteristics of the HMM; and parameterizing speech utterances according to one of linear prediction parameters or Mel-scale filter bank parameters. The method further includes selecting a frame period for accommodating the parameters and generating HMMs and decoding to specified speech utterances by causing the user to utter predefined training speech utterances for each HMM. The method then statistically computes the generated HMMs with the prototype HMM to provide a set of fully trained HMMs for each utterance indicative of the speaker. The trained HMMs are used for recognizing a speaker by computing Laplacian distances via distance table lookup for utterances of the speaker during the selected frame period; and iteratively decoding node transitions corresponding to the spoken utterances during the selected frame period to determine which predefined utterance is present.

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San Diego, CA, United States of America

Joe A Naylor