Design and evaluation of optimal cepstral lifters for accessing articulatory codebooks

It is noted that of great importance to the success of the articulatory approach to speech coding is the use of a good distortion measure between a given speech signal and the entries in a stored codebook of impulse responses and corresponding vocal-track shapes (articulatory codebook). One promising distortion measure is the weighted cepstral distortion. Since the impulse responses in the articulatory codebook do not include glottal characteristics, the authors derive optimal weighting functions (cepstral lifters) to reduce the influence of a varying glottal source on the cepstral distortion measure. This is done by examining the ensemble of cepstral coefficients of speech produced by an articulatory speech synthesizer that also includes a vocal-cord model. The obtained cepstral lifters are optimal for the given ensemble of cepstral coefficients and for given constraints on the weighting function. They are different for cepstral coefficients derived from the power spectrum (FFT cepstra) and for those derived from LPC (linear predictive coding) coefficients (LPC cepstra). The performances of the obtained cepstral lifters are compared in an articulatory codebook search