Patent ID: 9514739
Filing Date: 2016-12-06
CPC Classification: G10L

Claim Text:
1. An acoustic processing device for traversing a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), the device comprising: a senone scoring unit (SSU) configured to receive feature vectors over a physical data bus from a computing device external to the acoustic processing device and to calculate senone scores; a memory device configured to store the senone scores and HMM information, wherein the HMM information comprises HMM IDs and HMM state scores; an HMM module configured to traverse the HMM based on the senone scores and the HMM information while the computing device searches for additional HMMs, wherein the HMM module comprises a buffer, an HMM generator, a histogram pruning module, an HMM scoring module, a histogram generator, a pre-pruning module, and an arc generator, wherein the buffer, the HMM generator, the histogram pruning module, the HMM scoring module, the histogram generator, the pre-pruning module, and the arc generator traverse the HMM in a pipelined manner, wherein pruning by the histogram pruning module is performed after the HMM generator, and wherein pre-pruning by the pre-pruning module is performed after the pruning by the histogram pruning module and before analysis of a subsequent frame of data; and an interface module configured to transfer one or more HMM scoring requests associated with the HMM and additional HMMs from the computing device to the HMM module over the physical data bus and to transfer the HMM state scores to the computing device over the physical data bus.