Arabic vowels characterization and classification using the normalized energy in frequency bands

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to conduct an acoustic study of Arabic vowels (/a/, /a:/, /u/, /u:/, /i/ and /i:/) in order to determine the most relevant characteristics that allow recognizing these vowels. The analysis of vowel spectrograms reveals that the energy distribution as a function of time and frequency clearly differs according to the considered vowel. Thus, we used the normalized energy in frequency bands to classify these vowels. Thereafter, we have exploited the obtained results to develop algorithms that allow the classification of vowels and the distinction of the long vowels from the short ones. The efficiency of these algorithms was evaluated by testing their performances on our Arabic corpus.