Chirp group delay analysis of speech signals

This study proposes new group delay estimation techniques that can be used for analyzing resonance patterns of short-term discrete-time signals and more specifically speech signals. Phase processing or equivalently group delay processing of speech signals are known to be difficult due to large spikes in the phase/group delay functions that mask the formant structure. In this study, we first analyze in detail the z-transform zero patterns of short-term speech signals in the z-plane and discuss the sources of spikes on group delay functions, namely the zeros closely located to the unit circle. We show that windowing largely influences these patterns, therefore short-term phase processing. Through a systematic study, we then show that reliable phase/group delay estimation for speech signals can be achieved by appropriate windowing and group delay functions can reveal formant information as well as some of the characteristics of the glottal flow component in speech signals. However, such phase estimation is highly sensitive to noise and robust extraction of group delay based parameters remains difficult in real acoustic conditions even with appropriate windowing. As an alternative, we propose processing of chirp group delay functions, i.e. group delay functions computed on a circle other than the unit circle in z-plane, which can be guaranteed to be spike-free. We finally present one application in feature extraction for automatic speech recognition (ASR). We show that chirp group delay representations are potentially useful for improving ASR performance.