Although initially introduced and studied in the late 1960s and early 1970s, statistical methods of Markov source or hidden Markov modeling have become increasingly popular in the last several years. There are two strong reasons why this has occurred. First the models are very rich in mathematical structure and hence can form the theoretical basis for use in a wide range of applications. Sec-ond the models, when applied properly, work very well in practice for several important applications. In this paper we attempt to care-fully and methodically review the theoretical aspects of this type of statistical modeling and show how they have been applied to selected problems in machine recognition of speech. I.

Parameter sharing plays an important role in statistical modeling since training data are usually limited. On the one hand, we would like to use models that are as detailed as possible. On the other hand, with models too detailed, we can no longer reliably estimate the parameters. Triphone generalization may force two models to be merged together when only parts of the model output distributions are similar, while the rest of the output distributions are different. This problem can be avoided if clustering is carried out at the distribution level. In this paper, a shared-distribution model is proposed to replace generalized triphone models for speaker-independent continuous speech recognition. Here, output distributions in the hidden Markov model are shared with each other if they exhibit acoustic similarity. In addition to detailed representation, it also gives us the freedom to use a large number of states for each phonetic model. Although an increase in the number of states will inc...

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Abstract—An overview of statistical and information-theoretic aspects of hidden Markov processes (HMPs) is presented. An HMP is a discrete-time finite-state homogeneous Markov chain observed through a discrete-time memoryless invariant channel. In recent years, the work of Baum and Petrie on finite-state finite-alphabet HMPs was expanded to HMPs with finite as well as continuous state spaces and a general alphabet. In particular, statistical properties and ergodic theorems for relative entropy densities of HMPs were developed. Consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum-likelihood (ML) parameter estimator were proved under some mild conditions. Similar results were established for switching autoregressive processes. These processes generalize HMPs. New algorithms were developed for estimating the state, parameter, and order of an HMP, for universal coding and classification of HMPs, and for universal decoding of hidden Markov channels. These and other related topics are reviewed in this paper. Index Terms—Baum–Petrie algorithm, entropy ergodic theorems, finite-state channels, hidden Markov models, identifiability, Kalman filter, maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation, order estimation, recursive parameter estimation, switching autoregressive processes, Ziv inequality. I.

The recognition of repetitive movements characteristic of walking people, galloping horses, or flying birds is a routine function of the human visual system. It has been demonstrated that humans can recognize such activity solely on the basis of motion information. We present a novel computational approach for detecting such activities in real image sequences on the basis of the periodic nature of their signatures. The approach suggests a low-level feature based activity recognition mechanism. This contrasts with earlier model-based approaches for recognizing such activities. 1 Introduction The motion recognition ability of the human visual system is remarkable. People are able to distinguish both highly structured motion, such as that produced by walking, running, swimming or flying birds, and more statistical patterns such as that due to blowing snow, flowing water or fluttering leaves. More subtle movement characteristics can be distinguished as well. For example, human observers ...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Chapter 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 1.1. Thesis goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 1.2. Dissertation Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Chapter 2 The SPHINX-II Recognition System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1. An Overview of the SPHINX-II System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1.1. Signal Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1.2. Hidden Markov Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 2.1.3. Recognition Unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.1.4. Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2.1.5. Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 2.2. Experimental Tasks and Corpora . ...

The recognition of nonrigid motion, particularly that arising from human movement (and by extension from the locomotory activity of animals) has typically made use of high-level parametric models representing the various body parts (legs, arms, trunk, head etc.) and their connections to each other. Such model-based recognition has been successful in some cases; however, the methods are often difficult to apply to real-world scenes, and are severely limited in their generalizability. The first problem arises from the difficulty of acquiring and tracking the requisite model parts, usually specific joints such as knees, elbows or ankles. This generally requires some prior high-level understanding and segmentation of the scene, or initialization by a human operator. The second problem, with generalization, is due to the fact that the human model is not much good for dogs or birds, and for each new type of motion, a new model must be hand-crafted. In this paper, we show that the recognition...

Graphical models provide a promising paradigm to study both existing and novel techniques for automatic speech recognition. This paper first provides a brief overview of graphical models and their uses as statistical models. It is then shown that the statistical assumptions behind many pattern recognition techniques commonly used as part of a speech recognition system can be described by a graph – this includes Gaussian distributions, mixture models, decision trees, factor analysis, principle component analysis, linear discriminant analysis, and hidden Markov models. Moreover, this paper shows that many advanced models for speech recognition and language processing can also be simply described by a graph, including many at the acoustic-, pronunciation-, and language-modeling levels. A number of speech recognition techniques born directly out of the graphical-models paradigm are also surveyed. Additionally, this paper includes a novel graphical analysis regarding why derivative (or delta) features improve hidden Markov model-based speech recognition by improving structural discriminability. It also includes an example where a graph can be used to represent language model smoothing constraints. As will be seen, the space of models describable by a graph is quite large. A thorough exploration of this space should yield techniques that ultimately will supersede the hidden Markov model.

This report is concerned with integrating connectionist networks into a hidden Markov model (HMM) speech recognition system, This is achieved through a statistical understanding of connectionist networks as probability estimators, first elucidated by Herve Bourlard. We review the basis of HMM speech recognition, and point out the possible benefits of incorporating connectionist networks. We discuss some issues necessary to the construction of a connectionist HMM recognition system, and describe the performance of such a system, including evaluations on the DARPA database, in collaboration with Mike Cohen and Horacio Franco of SRI International. In conclusion, we show that a connectionist component improves a state of the art HMM system. ii Part I INTRODUCTION Over the past few years, connectionist models have been widely proposed as a potentially powerful approach to speech recognition (e.g. Makino et al. (1983), Huang et al. (1988) and Waibel et al. (1989)). However, whilst connec...

A new probabilistic background model based on a Hidden Markov Model is presented. The hidden states of the model enable discrimination between foreground, background and shadow. This model functions as a low level process for a car tracker. A particle filter is employed as a stochastic filter for the car tracker. The use of a particle filter allows the incorporation of the information from the low level process via importance sampling. A novel observation density for the particle filter which models the statistical dependence of neighboring pixels based on a Markov random field is presented. The effectiveness of both the low level process and the observation likelihood are demonstrated.