Vowel onset point detection for noisy speech using spectral energy at formant frequencies

In this paper, we propose a method for robust detection of the vowel onset points (VOPs) from noisy speech. The proposed VOP detection method exploits the spectral energy at formant frequencies of the speech segments present in glottal closure region. In this work, formants are extracted by using group delay function, and glottal closure instants are extracted by using zero frequency filter based method. Performance of the proposed VOP detection method is compared with the existing method, which uses the combination of evidence from excitation source, spectral peaks energy and modulation spectrum. Speech data from TIMIT database and noise samples from NOISEX database are used for analyzing the performance of the VOP detection methods. Significant improvement in the performance of VOP detection is observed by using proposed method compared to existing method. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York.