Automatic detection of breathy voiced vowels in Gujarati speech
This paper proposes a method for automatic detection of breathy voiced vowels in continuous Gujarati speech. As breathy voice is a specific phonetic feature predominantly present in Gujarati among Indian languages, it can be used for identifying Gujarati language. The objective of this paper is to differentiate breathy voiced vowels from modal voiced vowels based on loudness measure. Excitation source characteristics represented by loudness measure are used for differentiating the voice quality. In the proposed method, initially vowel regions in continuous speech are determined by using the knowledge of vowel onset points and epochs. Later, hypothesized vowel segments are classified by using loudness measure. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated on Gujarati speech utterances containing around 47 breathy and 192 modal vowels spoken by 5 male and 5 female speakers. Classification of vowels into breathy or modal voice is achieved with an accuracy of around 94%.
breathy voiced vowel modal voiced vowel loudness measure vowel onset point epoch