Heuristic and Statistical Methods for Speech/Non-speech Detector Design

Speech/non-speech (S/NS) detection plays the important role for automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, especially in the case of isolated words or commands recognition. Even in continuous speech a S/NS decision can be made at the beginning and at the end of a sequence resulting in a "sleep mode" of the speech recognizer during the silence and in a reduction of computation demands. It is very difficult, however, to precisely locate the endpoints of the input utterance because of unpredictable background noise. In the proposed method in this paper, we make use of the advantages of two approaches (i.e. to try to find the best set of heuristic features and apply a statistical induction method) for the best S/NS decision.