Fundamentals of Speech Recognition (Prentice Hall Signal Processing Series)

Provides a theoretically sound, technically accurate, and complete description of the basic knowledge and ideas that constitute a modern system for speech recognition by machine. Covers production, perception, and acoustic-phonetic characterization of the speech signal; signal processing and analysis methods for speech recognition; pattern comparison techniques; speech recognition system design and implementation; theory and implementation of hidden Markov models; speech recognition based on connected word models; large vocabulary continuous speech recognition; and task- oriented application of automatic speech recognition. For practicing engineers, scientists, linguists, and programmers interested in speech recognition.

Rabiner was the author of the first widely-read tutorial on HMMs, so
naturally the presentation of HMMs is one of the strong points of this
textbook. The theory is developed in detail, but in an easy to follow
fashion, starting with the very basics and with plenty of helpful examples.
The implementation is discussed at great length as well, starting with
the simplest of tasks and progressing to the state-of-the-art (circa 1993).

That isn't to say that HMMs are the only good part of this book - indeed,
practically every topic, whether it be perception, transforms, vector quantization
or dynamic programming, is presented with great clarity. This book really is easy to
learn from, with numerous examples and illustrations.

The field of speech recognition is inherently multi-disciplinary in nature,
drawing upon various areas of study, including Physics, Physiology, Acoustics,
Signal Processing and Computer Science, to name but a few. The authors do a
great job of explaining all these facets, as well as the mathematics that
is an essential tool.

The only caveat is that it's now a little old (published 1993), since the
field has been growing by leaps and bounds - so while the basics remain
the same, things have changed and hence what's said here should not be
taken as the last word on the subject.

Perhaps a new edition is due, and would certainly be most welcome.

However, for an excellent, accessible introduction to this exciting field,
this is still a great choice.


Good introduction for beginners   March 1, 2000
Olivier Pietquin (Belgium)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

The beginner in Automaitc Speech Recognition should read this book. It introduces all the basics of signal processing and vocal tract modeling needed and provides good descriptions of modern algorithms for statistical speech recognition (such as dynamic programmation, Hidden Markov Models, Viterbi Algorithm ...).


Classical Book for Speech recognition   June 23, 1999
8 out of 9 found this review helpful

This ia a classical book on speech recognition. It covers the basic concepts and practical speech recognition Techniques. The first tutorial on HMM by Rabiner,appeared in IEEE, is included in this book with much more practical examples. This book helped me a lot during my post graduation and work in the area of speech recognition. Thanks to Rabiner and Juang !!!


Good but contaminated with Linear Predictive Coding   April 24, 1999
14 out of 19 found this review helpful

Since this book misguides students of speech signal processing with the outdated compression technique of Linear Predictive Coding (LPC, which is far inferior to cepstral vocoding because of LPC's stateful memory of voiced excitation from one frame to the next), it ought to be half the price of Jelinek's book, not twice.