Phoneme Boundary Analysis using Multiway Geometric Properties of Waveform Trajectories

Automatic phoneme segmentation is an important problem in speech processing. It helps in improving the recognition quality by providing a proper segmentation information for phonemes or phonetic units. Inappropriate segmentation may lead to recognition falloff. The problem is essential not only for recognition but also for annotation purpose also. In general, segmentation algorithms rely on training large data sets where data is observed to find the patterns among them. But this process is not straight forward for languages that are under resourced because of less availability of datasets. In this paper, we propose a method that uses geometrical properties of waveform trajectory where intra signal variations are studied and used for segmentation. The method does not rely on large datasets for training. The geometric properties are extracted as linear structural changes in a raw waveform. The methods and findings of the study are presented.