Electronic Journal Technical Acoustics ISSN 1819-2408

M. Chandrasekar, M. Ponnavaikko

Spoken TAMIL character recognition

language: English

received 13.11.2007, published 07.12.2007

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ABSTRACT

Speech is one of the most complex signals and the powerful tool for communication. It has been a long desire of the scientists that the machine should recognize the speech of the human beings either for the machine to function on voice commands or for giving a text output of the speech. Automatic recognition of speech by machine has been a goal of research for more than four decades. Now speech recognition tool has become a necessity for busy executives and industrial applications. Since beginning the research in this direction has been concentrating on English Speech recognition. Only from the last few years works are being carried out for recognizing speech in other languages. The Indian languages are structurally and syntactically different from Latin. This paper presents an approach for the recognition of spoken characters in Indian languages particularly Tamil using acoustic features of individual letters. A three layered back propagation neural network approach used for solving the problem is presented. The efficiency of the method presented is highlighted by applying the same to Tamil characters recognition.

Keywords: automatic speech recognition, Indian languages, Tamil language, neural network

11 pages, 3 figures

Сitation: M. Chandrasekar, M. Ponnavaikko. Spoken TAMIL character recognition. Electronic Journal “Technical Acoustics”, http://www.ejta.org, 2007, 22.

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		M. Chandrasekar received his M.E. degree from Anna University, Tamilnadu in 1987. He is doing research in recognizing Tamil sentences. He has 12 years of industrial experience and 15 years of teaching experience. He is now serving as Professor and HOD for TQM department in SRM School of centre of excellence for TQM, SRM University Chennai, Tamilnadu, India. e-mail: chandramu2000(at)yahoo.co.in
		Murugesan Ponnavaiko is a graduate in Electrical Engineering and a Post graduate in Power System Engineering, from the College of Engineering Guindy. He received his PhD degree in Optimal Distribution System Planning from I.I.T.(Delhi) in 1983. He has proven record of excellence as Technologist, Administrator, Academic and Leader. He started his carrier from Tamil Nadu Electricity Board in 1972 and had seventeen years of eventful service as Consultant and Administrator in the Public Power Sectors in India and abroad. He entered into the Academic World in 1986 as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and taught power system courses for three years in Libya. From 1989 till June 2000, he served as the Professor and Head, Dept. of CSE, initially at Mookambigai college of Engineering, then at Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirapalli, and later at the Crescent Engineering College, Chennai. He then served as the Director, at the level of Vice-Chancellor at the Tamil Virtual University from July 2000 till August 2003. Then served as the Director, Research and Virtual Education at the SRM University from September 2003 till 10th July 2007. At present he is the Vice-Chancellor, Bharathidasan University, Tamilnadu. He was a pioneer in the country to promote energy conservation techniques using his models for improving the Distribution systems of the State Electricity Boards through Rural Electrification Corporation, New Delhi. He is also a pioneer in promoting Virtual Education in the country. His contributions to the Tamil Virtual University of the Tamil Nadu Government, as its founder Director are unique and remarkable. He has been making key contributions to the Tamil Computing, Computer Curriculum and development of Tamil All Character Encoding (TACE - 16) standard for Unicode. He has been a researcher and consultant in the areas of Power Systems and Computer Engineering for nearly 4 decades. He has made original contributions, and his models are known as “Ko Models”. He has authored / edited 14 computer books for school education in Tamil/English and published over 60 technical papers and worked on more than 30 research projects. e-mail: ponnav(at)gmail.com