Voice segmentation system based on energy estimation

Voice segmentation is used in speech recognition and system synthesis, as well as in phonetic voice encoders. This paper describes an implicit speech segmentation system, which aims to estimate the boundaries between phonemes in a locution. To find the segmentation marks, the proposed method initially locates reference borders between silent periods and phonemes, and vice versa measuring energy in short duration periods. The phonetic boundaries are found by means of energy encoding in the region delimited by the reference marks, which were initially detected. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, an objective evaluation using 50 locutions was performed. The system detected 72.41% of the segmentation marks, in which, 77.6% were detected with an error less or equal to 10 ms and 22.4% of the boundaries were found with an error between 10 and 20 ms.