Digital processor based complex acoustic resonance digital speech analysis system

A speech processing system for extracting speech content from a digital speech signal, the speech content being characterized by at least one formant, each of the at least one formants characterized by an instantaneous frequency and an instantaneous bandwidth, the speech signal including a sequence of one or more of the at least one formants, the system comprising:

• at least one digital processor, the at least one digital processor programmed with instructions stored on at least one readable storage medium, the execution of the instructions by the at least one digital processor causing the at least one digital processor to perform the method of:
• extracting each one of the sequence of formants from the digital speech signal, said extracting further comprising:
• filtering the speech resonance signal with a plurality of complex digital filters, implemented with overlapping bandwidths to form a virtual parallel processing chain, to generate a plurality of complex digitally filtered signals having a real component and an imaginary component;
• forming an integrated-product set for each of the plurality of complex digitally filtered signals using an integration kernel, the integrated-product set having at least one zero-lag complex product and at least one single-lag complex product;
• generating an estimated instantaneous frequency and an estimated instantaneous bandwidth from each of the integrated-product sets;
• and
• identifying each of the sequence of one or more formants of the digital speech signal as one of the at least one formants based on the estimated instantaneous frequencies and estimated instantaneous bandwidths;
• and
• reconstructing the speech content of the digital speech signal based on the identified sequence of formants.

An apparatus for extracting speech content within a digitized speech signal, the speech content being characterized by at least one formant, each of the at least one formants characterized by an instantaneous frequency and an instantaneous bandwidth, the speech signal including a sequence of one or more of the at least one formants, the apparatus comprising:

• a reconstruction processor configured by program instructions to receive and operate on samples of the digital speech signal, the reconstruction processor computationally implementing a plurality of complex digital filters, the plurality of complex digital filters implemented to perform their processing in parallel on each sample of the digital speech signal, each of the complex digital filters characterized by a bandwidth that overlaps with the bandwidth of at least one other of the plurality of complex filters, each of the complex digital filters generating as an output one of a plurality of digitally filtered signals, each of the digitally filtered signals comprising discreet values for each sample of the digital speech signal processed, each of the digitally filtered signals including a real component and an imaginary component;
• an estimator processor configured by program instructions to receive the plurality of digitally filtered signals from the reconstruction processor, the estimator processor computationally implementing an estimator object, the estimator object being instantiated for each one of the generated digitally filtered signals, each instantiation of the estimator object configured to generate an estimated instantaneous frequency and an estimated instantaneous bandwidth from each of the plurality of digitally filtered signals using a product set formed of each of the plurality of digitally filtered signals;
• and
• a post-processing processor configured by program instructions to receive the estimated instantaneous frequency and instantaneous bandwidth estimates for each of the plurality of digitally filtered signals from the estimator processor, the post-processing processor further configured by program instructions to identify each of the sequence of one or more formants of the digital speech signal as one of the at least one formants based on the received estimated instantaneous frequencies and estimated instantaneous bandwidths of the plurality of filtered signals, the post-processing processor also configured by program instructions to reconstruct the speech content of the digital speech signal using the identified formants.