Front end analysis of speech recognition: a review

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has made great strides with the development of digital signal processing hardware and software. But despite of all these advances, machines can not match the performance of their human counterparts in terms of accuracy and speed, especially in case of speaker independent speech recognition. So, today significant portion of speech recognition research is focused on speaker independent speech recognition problem. Before recognition, speech processing has to be carried out to get a feature vectors of the signal. So, front end analysis plays a important role. The reasons are its wide range of applications, and limitations of available techniques of speech recognition. So, in this report we briefly discuss the different aspects of front end analysis of speech recognition including sound characteristics, feature extraction techniques, spectral representations of the speech signal etc. We have also discussed the various advantages and disadvantages of each feature extraction technique, along with the suitability of each method to particular application.