Optimizing feature extraction for speech recognition

We propose a method to minimize the loss of information during the feature extraction stage in speech recognition by optimizing the parameters of the mel-cepstrum transformation, a transform which is widely used in speech recognition. Typically, the mel-cepstrum is obtained by critical band filters whose characteristics play an important role in converting a speech signal into a sequence of vectors. First, we analyze the performance of the mel-cepstrum by changing the parameters of the filters such as shape, center frequency, and bandwidth. Then we propose an algorithm to optimize the parameters of the filters using the simplex method. Experiments with Korean digit words show that the recognition rate improved by about 4-7%.