Shouted speech detection using hidden markov model with rahmonic and mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients

Abstract

In recent years, crime prevention systems have been developed to detect various hazardous situations. In general, the systems utilize the image information recorded by a camera to monitor the situations. It is however difficult to detect them in the blind area. To address the problem, it is required to utilize not only image information but also acoustic information occurred in such situations. Our previous study showed that two acoustic features including rahmonic and mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCCs) are effective for detecting the shouted speech. Rahmonic shows a subharmonic of fundamental frequency in the cepstrum domain, and MFCCs represent coefficients that collectively make up mel-frequency cepstrum. In this method, a shouted speech model is constructed from these features by using a gaussian mixture model (GMM). However, the previous method with GMM has difficulty in representing temporal changes of the speech features. In this study, we further expand the previous method using hidden Markov model (HMM) which has state transition to represent the temporal changes. Through objective experiments, the proposed method using HMM could achieve higher detection performance of the shouted speech than the conventional method using GMM.