An optimization algorithm for determining the endpoints of isolated utterances

This paper describes an optimization technique for locating the initial and final points of utterances. Acoustic parameters extracted from each signal segment are converted into a cost function versus time. An overall cost for the presence of a speech signal is introduced and is to be optimized with respect to the unknown initial and final points. The optimization is carried out by means of dynamic programming. The computation grows linearly with the number of segments. In a second stage, the locations of the obtained endpoints are refined by matching, transition templates against the input signal. Results are presented for end-point detection in a speaker recognition system using only the speech intensity as acoustic parameter.