Seminar Speech Recognition

Mel-spectrum computation
new_fe_sp.c

Presentation by Yu Zhang scuyuzh@hotmail.com Oct 1st,2003

Mel-frequency Wrapping
We know that human ears, for frequencies lower than 1 kHz, hears tones with a linear scale instead of logarithmic scale for the frequencies higher that 1 kHz. The mel-frequency scale is a linear frequency spacing below 1000 Hz and a logarithmic spacing above 1000 Hz. The voice signals have most of their energy in the low frequencies. It is also very natural to use a mel-spaced filter bank showing the above characteristics.

Mel-frequency Wrapping
Use the following approximate formula to compute the mels for a given frequency f in Hz:

mel( f ) 2595* log 10(1 f / 700)

line 165 of new_fe_sp.c float32 fe_mel(float32 x) { return( 2595.0 * ( float32 ) log10 (1.0 + x / 700.0 ) ); } float32 fe_melinv(float32 x) { return( 700.0 * ( ( float32 ) pow (10.0 , x / 2595.0 ) - 1.0 ) ); }

The mel-frequency scale is a linear frequency spacing below 1000 Hz and a logarithmic spacing above 1000 Hz.

For each tone with an actual frequency, f, measured in Hz, a subjective pitch is measured on a scale called the mel scale. The pitch of a 1 kHz tone, 40 dB above the perceptual hearing threshold, is defined as 1000 mels.

Mel-frequency Wrapping

Figure 1

Figure 1: Power Spectrum without Mel-frequency Wrapping Figure 2: Mel-frequency Wrapping of Power Spectrum

Figure 2

Considering the full image with the mel frequency wrapping set, there is less imformation than the one without the mel frequency.But instead if we looking in details,we see that the image with the mel frequency wrapping keeps the low frequences and removes some informaiton. To summarize,the Mel Frequency wrapping set allows us to keep only the part of useful information.

Mel spectrum
The Mel spectrum is computed by multiplying the Power Spectrum by each of the Triangular Mel Weighting filters and integrating the result.
N /2 S [l ] S[k ]Ml[k ] k 0

= 0,1,,L-1

S[k] is the power spectrum N is the length of the Discrete Fourier Transform L is total number of Triangular Mel weighting filters.

Building the Triangular Mel Weighting filters

line 62 in new_fe_sp.c
int32 fe_build_melfilters(melfb_t *MEL_FB) { //estimate filter coefficients MEL_FB->filter_coeffs = (float32 **)fe_create_2d(MEL_FB->num_filters, MEL_FB->fft_size, sizeof(float32)); MEL_FB->left_apex = (float32 *) calloc(MEL_FB->num_filters,sizeof(float32)); MEL_FB->width = (int32 *) calloc(MEL_FB->num_filters,sizeof(int32)); filt_edge = (float32 *) calloc(MEL_FB->num_filters+2,sizeof(float32)); melmax = fe_mel(MEL_FB->upper_filt_freq); melmin = fe_mel(MEL_FB->lower_filt_freq); for (i=0;i<=MEL_FB->num_filters+1; ++i){ filt_edge[i] = fe_melinv(i*dmelbw + melmin); } for (whichfilt=0;whichfilt<MEL_FB->num_filters; ++whichfilt) { //Building the triangular mel weighting filters } }

Building the Mel spectrum

line 156 in new_fe_sp.c
void fe_mel_spec(fe_t *FE, float64 *spec, float64 *mfspec) { int32 whichfilt, start, i; float32 dfreq; dfreq = FE->SAMPLING_RATE/(float32)FE->FFT_SIZE; for (whichfilt = 0; whichfilt<FE->MEL_FB->num_filters; whichfilt++){ start = (int32)(FE->MEL_FB->left_apex[whichfilt]/dfreq) + 1; mfspec[whichfilt] = 0; for (i=0; i< FE->MEL_FB->width[whichfilt]; i++) mfspec[whichfilt] +=FE->MEL_FB->filter_coeffs[whichfilt][i]*spec[start+i]; } }

/* k 0 *FE is the triangular mel weighting filter *spec is the power spectrum l=0,1,L-1 *mfspec is the mel spectrum variables marked in red are coefficients of mel weighting filter */

N /2 S [l ] S[k ]Ml[k ]

REFERENCES
(1)SPHINX III Signal Processing Front End Specification 31 August 1999, Michael Seltzer (mseltzer@cs.cmu.edu) CMU Speech Group (2) Digital Signal Processing Mini-Project An Automatic Speaker Recognition System Minh N. Do, Audio Visual Communications Laboratory Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland

(3) Project of Digital Signal Processing - AN AUTOMATIC SPEAKER RECOGNITION SYSTEM

Swati Rastogi (DSC) swati.rastogi@epfl.ch David Mayor (DSC) david.mayor@epfl.ch