GLOTTAL EXCITATION EXTRACTION OF VOICED SPEECH - JOINTLY PARAMETRIC AND NONPARAMETRIC APPROACHES

The goal of this dissertation is to develop methods to recover glottal flow pulses, which contain biometrical information about the speaker. The excitation information estimated from an observed speech utterance is modeled as the source of an inverse problem. Windowed linear prediction analysis and inverse filtering are first used to deconvolve the speech signal to obtain a rough estimate of glottal flow pulses. Linear prediction and its inverse filtering can largely eliminate the vocal-tract response which is usually modeled as infinite impulse response filter. Some remaining vocal-tract components that reside in the estimate after inverse filtering are next removed by maximum-phase and minimum-phase decomposition which is implemented by applying the complex cepstrum to the initial estimate of the glottal pulses. The additive and residual errors from inverse filtering can be suppressed by higher-order statistics which is the method used to calculate cepstrum representations. Some features directly provided by the glottal source\u27s cepstrum representation as well as fitting parameters for estimated pulses are used to form feature patterns that were applied to a minimum-distance classifier to realize a speaker identification system with very limited subjects