Spectral histogram of oriented gradients (SHOGs) for Tamil language male/female speaker classification
Gender (Male/Female) classification plays a primary vital role to develop a robust Automatic Tamil Speech Recognition (ASR) applications due to the diversity in the vocal tract of speakers. Various features including Formants (F1, F2, F3, F4), Zero Crossings, and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) etc. have appeared in the literature especially for speech/signal classification/recognition. Recently Dalal et al. have proposed a feature called as Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) for extracting feature from an image for efficient detection/classification of objects. We extend and apply the HOG for spectrogram of speech signal and hence called as Spectral Histogram of Oriented Gradients (SHOGs). The results of Tamil language male/female speaker classification using SHOGs features shows good improvement in the classification rate when compared to other features. The results of combination of various features with SHOGs are also promissing.
spectral histogram of oriented gradients (shogs) hogs formants mfccs zero-crossing rate (zcr) speech classification