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Abstract

A speech recognition method and apparatus for detecting and recognizing one or more keywords in a continuous audio signal are disclosed. Each keyword is represented by a keyword template which corresponds to a sequence of plural target patterns, and each target pattern comprises statistics representing each of a plurality of spectra selected from plural short-term spectra generated according to a predetermined system for processing the incoming audio. The target patterns also have associated therewith minimum and maximum dwell times. The dwell time is the time interval during which a given target pattern can be said to match incoming frame patterns. The spectra are processed to enhance the separation between the spectral pattern classes during later analysis. The processed audio spectra are grouped into multi-frame spectral patterns and each multi-frame spectral pattern is compared by means of likelihood statistics with the target patterns of keyword templates. Each formed multi-frame pattern is then forced to contribute to the total word score for each keyword as represented by the keyword template. Thus the keyword recognition method requires all input patterns to contribute to the word score of a keyword candidate, using the minimum and maximum dwell times for testing whether a target pattern can still match an input pattern, and wherein the frame rate of the audio spectra must be less than one-half the minimum dwell time of a target pattern. A concatentation technique employing a loosely set detection threshold makes it very unlikely that a correct pattern will be rejected. A method for forming the target patterns is also described.

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