Voice activation detection using Teager-Kaiser energy measure

Voice Activity Detection (VAD) has a wide application in speech coding, speech recognition, and saving the computation and bandwidth of a communication system which uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). In this paper, a modified Teager-Kaiser Energy (TKE) operator is adapted and used as a VAD feature. The modification includes a combination of different orders of TKE operator which shows good performance and robustness in detecting the speech signal under different Signal to Noise Ratios (SNRs). Simulation results indicate higher accuracy of voice detection using the proposed TKE feature instead of the energy feature usually applied in VAD methods.