Arabic stop consonants characterisation and classification using the normalized energy in frequency bands

In general, speech is made with sequences of consonants (fricatives, nasals and stops), vowels and glides. The classification of the stop consonants remains one of the most challenging problems in speech recognition. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on the normalized energy in frequency bands in the release and closure phases in order to characterize and classify the Arabic stop consonants (/b/, /d/, /t/, /k/ and /q/) and to recognize the CV syllable. Classification experiments were performed using decision algorithms on stop consonants C and CV syllables extracted from an Arabic corpus. The results yielded to an overall stop consonants classification of 90.27% and syllables CV recognition upper than 90% for all stops. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.