Optimization of Gaussian Mixture in CDHMM Training for Improved Speech Recognition

  • Lee, Seo-Gu (LG Electronics, Display Division) ;
  • Kim, Sung-Gil (School of Electrical Engineering, KOREA UNIVERSITY) ;
  • Kang, Sun-Mee (Department of Computer Science, SEOKYEONG UNIVERSITY) ;
  • Ko, Han-Seok (Department of Computer Science, SEOKYEONG UNIVERSITY)
  • Published : 1999.04.01

Abstract

This paper proposes an improved training procedure in speech recognition based on the continuous density of the Hidden Markov Model (CDHMM). Of the three parameters (initial state distribution probability, state transition probability, output probability density function (p.d.f.) of state) governing the CDHMM model, we focus on the third parameter and propose an efficient algorithm that determines the p.d.f. of each state. It is known that the resulting CDHMM model converges to a local maximum point of parameter estimation via the iterative Expectation Maximization procedure. Specifically, we propose two independent algorithms that can be embedded in the segmental K -means training procedure by replacing relevant key steps; the adaptation of the number of mixture Gaussian p.d.f. and the initialization using the CDHMM parameters previously estimated. The proposed adaptation algorithm searches for the optimal number of mixture Gaussian humps to ensure that the p.d.f. is consistently re-estimated, enabling the model to converge toward the global maximum point. By applying an appropriate threshold value, which measures the amount of collective changes of weighted variances, the optimized number of mixture Gaussian branch is determined. The initialization algorithm essentially exploits the CDHMM parameters previously estimated and uses them as the basis for the current initial segmentation subroutine. It captures the trend of previous training history whereas the uniform segmentation decimates it. The recognition performance of the proposed adaptation procedures along with the suggested initialization is verified to be always better than that of existing training procedure using fixed number of mixture Gaussian p.d.f.

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