Recognition of Cantonese finals using heuristic methodology

This paper present a heuristic methodology to recognize Cantonese finals. A consonant/vowel recognition is first used to segment the initial and final. After segmentation, the final is recognized by first classifying into an individual final group by a simple distortion measurement and then recognized by dynamic time warping within each final group. The feature extraction for final group classification is done by a presudo-search of the repeating harmony unit in the middle steady part of the final. The tailing consonant is found by a presudo-search of the segmentation point. The presudo-search using both procedures is characterised by pitch determination and harmony unit comparison. Using this methodology, an averaged recognition accuracy of 93.44% is obtained for recognizing finals. Compared with other methodologies using HMM or dynamic time warping, the explicit use of Cantonese speech feature is enhances the results and recognition speed