Intrinsic-cum-extrinsic normalization of formant data of vowels

Using a known speaker-intrinsic normalization procedure, formant data are scaled by the reciprocal of the geometric mean of the first three formant frequencies. This reduces the influence of the talker but results in a distorted vowel space. The proposed speaker-extrinsic procedure re-scales the normalized values by the mean formant values of vowels. When tested on the formant data of vowels published by Peterson and Barney, the combined approach leads to well separated clusters by reducing the spread due to talkers. The proposed procedure performs better than two top-ranked normalization procedures based on the accuracy of vowel classification as the objective measure. (C) 2016 Acoustical Society of Americ