Affiliations: [a] School of Computing, SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur, India
| [b] Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India
| [c] Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr.Sagunthala R&D Institute of Science and Technology, Avadi, Chennai, India
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author. V. Subramaniyaswamy, School of Computing, SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur, India. E-mail: vsubramaniyaswamy@gmail.com.
Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder caused by stroke, Parkinson’s disease, neurological injury, or tumors that damage the nervous system and weaken the speech quality. Developing a unique voice command system for Dysarthric speech helps to recognize impaired speech and convert them into text or input commands. Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is one of the widely used generative model-based classifiers for Dysarthric speech recognition. But due to insufficient training data, HMM doesn’t provide optimal results on overlapping classes. We propose an ensemble Gaussian mixture model to recognize impaired speech more accurately. Our model converts the sequence of feature vectors into a fixed dimensional representation of patterns with varying lengths. The performance efficiency of the proposed model is evaluated on the Dysarthric UA-speech benchmark dataset. The discriminatory information provided by the proposed approach yields better classification accuracy even for shallow intelligibility words compared to conventional HMM.
