SPEECH RECOGNITION USING CONTINUOUS DENSITY HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS AND THE ORTHOGONALIZING KARHUNEN-LOEVE TRANSFORMATION

A recognition system comprises a feature extractor for extracting a feature vector x from an input speech signal, and a recognizing section for defining continuous density Hidden Markov Models of predetermined categories k as transition network models each having parameters of transition probabilities p(k,i,j) that a state Si transits to a next state Sj and output probabilities g(k,s) that a feature vector x is output in transition from the state Si to one of the states Si and Sj, and recognizing the input signal on the basis of similarity between a sequence X of feature vectors extracted by the feature extractor and the continuous density HMMs. Particularly, the recognizing section includes a memory section for storing a set of orthogonal vectors .phi..sub.m (k,s) provided for the continuous density HMMs, and a modified CDHMM processor for obtaining each of the output probabilities g(k,s) for the continuous density HMMs in accordance with corresponding orthogonal vectors .phi..sub.m (k,s).