A Study on Measuring the Speaking Rate of Speaking Signal by Using Line Spectrum Pair Coefficients

Speaking rate represents how many phonemes in speech signal have in limited time. It is various and changeable depending on the speakers and the characters of each phoneme. The preprocessing to remove the effect of variety of speaking rate is necessary before recognizing the speech in the present speech recognition systems. So if it is possible to estimate the speaking rate in advance, the performance of speech recognition can be higher. However, the conventional speech vocoder decides the transmission rate for analyzing the fixed period no regardless of the variety rate of phoneme but if the speaking rate can be estimated in advance, it is very important information of speech to use in speech coding part as well. It increases the quality of sound in vocoder as well as applies the variable transmission rate. In this paper, we propose the method for presenting the speaking rate as parameter in speech vocoder. To estimate the speaking rate, the variety of phoneme is estimated and the Line Spectrum Pairs is used to estimate it. As a result of comparing the speaking rate performance with the proposed algorithm and passivity method worked by eye, error between two methods is 5.38% about fast utterance and 1.78% about slow utterance and the accuracy between two methods is 98% about slow utterance and 94% about fast utterances in 30 dB SNR and 10 dB SNR respectively.