Analysis of Acoustic Events in Speech Signals Using Bessel Series Expansion

In this paper, we propose an approach for the analysis and detection of acoustic events in speech signals using the Bessel series expansion. The acoustic events analyzed are the voice onset time (VOT) and the glottal closure instants (GCIs). The hypothesis is that the Bessel functions with their damped sinusoid-like basis functions are better suited for representing the speech signals than the sinusoidal basis functions used in the conventional Fourier representation. The speech signal is band-pass filtered by choosing the appropriate range of Bessel coefficients to obtain a narrow-band signal, which is decomposed further into amplitude modulated (AM) and frequency modulated (FM) components. The discrete energy separation algorithm (DESA) is used to compute the amplitude envelope (AE) of the narrow-band AM-FM signal. Events such as the consonant and vowel beginnings in an unvoiced stop consonant vowel (SCV) and the GCIs are derived by processing the AE of the signal. The proposed approach for the detection of the VOT using the Bessel expansion is shown to perform better than the conventional Fourier representation. The performance of the proposed GCI detection method using the Bessel series expansion is compared against some of the existing methods for various noise environments and signal-to-noise ratios.