A5 -- Prototype

A5 -- Prototype

To test an Automatic Syllable Detector on a modern database, we selected Mermelstein's recursive convex hull algorithm and implemented it.
[Mermelstein JASA 58(4):880-883]
  • Broadband energy track (500 Hz - 4 kHz)
  • Recursive convex hull algorithm for peak picking
  • Level constraint (peak must be less than 25 dB below overall peak)
  • Duration constraint (time between dips must be longer than 80 ms)
  • Post processing to reject fricative peaks

Mermelstein's database is minimal (2 male talkers, 11 sentences each). We compare his performance results with the prototype's performance on a large database (TIMIT), which is substantially worse. Then we adjust the algorithm's parameters in an attempt to improve performance.