Voice Command Recognition Using Biologically Inspired Time-Frequency Representation and Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Voice command is an important interface between human and technology in healthcare, such as for hands-free control of surgical robots and in patient care technology. Voice command recognition can be cast as a speech classification task, where convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated strong performance. CNN is originally an image classification technique and time-frequency representation of speech signals is the most commonly used image-like representation for CNNs. Various types of time-frequency representations are commonly used for this purpose. This work investigates the use of cochleagram, utilizing a gammatone filter which models the frequency selectivity of the human cochlea, as the time-frequency representation of voice commands and input for the CNN classifier. We also explore multi-view CNN as a technique for combining learning from different time-frequency representations. The proposed method is evaluated on a large dataset and shown to achieve high classification accuracy.