Speech rhythm guided syllable nuclei detection

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel speech-rhythm-guided syllable-nuclei location detection algorithm. As a departure from conventional methods, we introduce an instantaneous speech rhythm estimator to predict possible regions where syllable nuclei can appear. Within a possible region, a simple slope based peak counting algorithm is used to get the exact location of each syllable nucleus. We verify the correctness of our method by investigating the syllable nuclei interval distribution in TIMIT dataset, and evaluate the performance by comparing with a state-of-the-art syllable nuclei based speech rate detection approach.