Mfcc explained

1. How do you explain MFCC?
2. What do MFCCs do?
3. How is MFCC used in speech recognition?
4. Why is MFCC used for feature extraction?

How do you explain MFCC?

The mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) of a signal are a small set of features (usually about 10-20) which concisely describe the overall shape of a spectral envelope. In MIR, it is often used to describe timbre.

What do MFCCs do?

MFCCs are commonly used as features in speech recognition systems, such as the systems which can automatically recognize numbers spoken into a telephone. MFCCs are also increasingly finding uses in music information retrieval applications such as genre classification, audio similarity measures, etc.

How is MFCC used in speech recognition?

MFCC are popular features extracted from speech signals for use in recognition tasks. In the source-filter model of speech, MFCC are understood to represent the filter (vocal tract). The frequency response of the vocal tract is relatively smooth, whereas the source of voiced speech can be modeled as an impulse train.

Why is MFCC used for feature extraction?

It is observed that extracting features from the audio signal and using it as input to the base model will produce much better performance than directly considering raw audio signal as input. MFCC is the widely used technique for extracting the features from the audio signal.