A New Method for Noisy Speech Classification Based on Gaussian Mixture Models

Speech can be broadly categorized into voiceless, voiced, and mute signal, in which voiced speech can be further classified into vowel and voiced consonant. With the ever increasing demand of the speech synthesis applications, it is urgent to develop an effective classification method to differentiate vowel and voiced consonant signal since they are two distinct components that affect the naturalness of the synthetic speech signal. State-of-the-arts algorithms for speech signal classification are effective in classifying voiceless, voiced and mute speech signal, however, not effective in further classifying the voiced signal. In view of the issue, a new algorithm for speech classification based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is proposed, which can directly classify a speech into voiceless, voiced consonant, vowel and mute signal. Specifically, a new speech feature is proposed, and the GMM is also modified for speech classification. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is effective even under the noisy environments.