An HMM‐Like Dynamic Time Warping Scheme for Automatic Speech Recognition

Abstract

In the past, the kernel of automatic speech recognition (ASR) is dynamic time warping (DTW), which is feature‐based template matching and belongs to the category technique of dynamic programming (DP). Although DTW is an early developed ASR technique, DTW has been popular in lots of applications. DTW is playing an important role for the known Kinect‐based gesture recognition application now. This paper proposed an intelligent speech recognition system using an improved DTW approach for multimedia and home automation services. The improved DTW presented in this work, called HMM‐like DTW, is essentially a hidden Markov model‐ (HMM‐) like method where the concept of the typical HMM statistical model is brought into the design of DTW. The developed HMM‐like DTW method, transforming feature‐based DTW recognition into model‐based DTW recognition, will be able to behave as the HMM recognition technique and therefore proposed HMM‐like DTW with the HMM‐like recognition model will have the capability to further perform model adaptation (also known as speaker adaptation). A series of experimental results in home automation‐based multimedia access service environments demonstrated the superiority and effectiveness of the developed smart speech recognition system by HMM‐like DTW.