A formant tracking system toward automatic recognition of speech

This paper describes the implementation of a Speech Understanding System component which tracks the formants of pseudo-syllabic nuclei containing voiced consonants. The nuclei are isolated from continuous speech after a precategorical classification in which feature extraction is carried out by modules organized in a hierarchy of levels. FFT and LPC spectra are the input to the formant tracking system. It works under the control of rules specifying the possible formant evolutions given previously hypothesized phonetic features and produces fuzzy graphs rather than usual formant patterns because formants are not always evident in the spectrogram pattern.