Design of Keyword Spotting System Based on Segmental Time Warping of Quantized Features

Abstract

Keyword Spotting in general means identifying a keyword in a verbal or written document. In this research a novel approach in designing a simple spoken Keyword Spotting/Recognition system based on Template Matching is proposed, which is different from the Hidden Markov Model based systems that are most widely used today. The system can be used equally efficiently on any language as it does not rely on an underlying language model or grammatical constraints. The proposed method for keyword spotting is based on a modified version of classical Dynamic Time Warping which has been a primary method for measuring the similarity between two sequences varying in time. For processing, a speech signal is divided into small stationary frames. Each frame is represented in terms of a quantized feature vector. Both the keyword and the speech utterance are represented in terms of 1‐dimensional codebook indices. The utterance is divided into segments and the warped distance is computed for each segment and compared against the test keyword. A distortion score for each segment is computed as likelihood measure of the keyword. The proposed algorithm is designed to take advantage of multiple instances of test keyword (if available) by merging the score for all keywords used. The training method for the proposed system is completely unsupervised, i.e., it requires neither a language model nor phoneme model for keyword spotting. Prior unsupervised training algorithms were based on computing Gaussian Posteriorgrams making the training process complex but the proposed algorithm requires minimal training data and the system can also be trained to perform on a different environment (language, noise level, recording medium etc.) by re‐training the original cluster on additional data. Techniques for designing a model keyword from multiple instances of the test keyword are discussed. System performance over variations of different parameters like number of clusters, number of instance of keyword available, etc were studied in order to optimize the speed and accuracy of the system. The system performance was evaluated for fourteen different keywords from the Call - Home and the Switchboard speech corpus. Results varied for different keywords and a maximum accuracy of 90% was obtained which is comparable to other methods using the same time warping algorithms on Gaussian Posteriorgrams. Results are compared for different parameters variation with suggestion of possible improvements.