5.7.1 HTK Format Parameter Files

HTK format files consist of a contiguous sequence of samples preceded by a header. Each sample is a vector of either 2-byte integers or 4-byte floats. 2-byte integers are used for compressed forms as described below and for vector quantised data as described later in section 5.11. HTK format data files can also be used to store speech waveforms as described in section 5.8.  

The HTK file format header is 12 bytes long and contains the following data

 
		nSamples		- number of samples in file (4-byte integer)

		sampPeriod		- sample period in 100ns units (4-byte integer)

		sampSize		- number of bytes per sample (2-byte integer)

		parmKind		- a code indicating the sample kind (2-byte integer)

The parameter kind  consists of a 6 bit code representing the basic parameter kind plus additional bits for each of the possible qualifiers . The basic parameter kind codes are

 
		0 		 WAVEFORM 		 sampled waveform

		1 		 LPC 		 linear prediction filter coefficients

		2 		 LPREFC 		 linear prediction reflection coefficients

		3 		 LPCEPSTRA 		 LPC cepstral coefficients

		4 		 LPDELCEP  		 LPC cepstra plus delta coefficients

		5 		 IREFC	    		 LPC reflection coef in 16 bit integer format

		6 		 MFCC      		 mel-frequency cepstral coefficients

		7 		 FBANK     		 log mel-filter bank channel outputs

		8 		 MELSPEC     		 linear mel-filter bank channel outputs

		9 		 USER      		 user defined sample kind

		10 		 DISCRETE 		 vector quantised data

and the bit-encoding for the qualifiers (in octal) is

 
		_E 		 000100 		 has energy

		_N 		 000200 		 absolute energy suppressed

		_D 		 000400 		 has delta coefficients

		_A 		 001000 		 has acceleration coefficients

		_C 		 002000 		 is compressed

		_Z 		 004000 		 has zero mean static coef.

		_K 		 010000 		 has CRC checksum

		_O 		 020000 		 has 0'th cepstral coef.

  The _A qualifier can only be specified when _D is also specified. The _N qualifier is only valid when both energy and delta coefficients are present. The sample kind LPDELCEP is identical to LPCEPSTRA_D and is retained for compatibility with older versions of HTK. The _C  and _K  only exist in external files. Compressed files are always decompressed on loading and any attached CRC is checked and removed. An external file can contain both an energy term and a 0'th order cepstral coefficient. These may be retained on loading but normally one or the other is discarded.

 

All parameterised forms of HTK data files consist of a sequence of vectors. Each vector is organised as shown by the examples in Fig 5.4 where various different qualified forms are listed. As can be seen, an energy value if present immediately follows the base coefficients. If delta coefficients are added, these follow the base coefficients and energy value. Note that the base form LPC is used in this figure only as an example, the same layout applies to all base sample kinds. If the 0'th order cepstral coefficient is included as well as energy then it is inserted immediately before the energy coefficient, otherwise it replaces it.

For external storage of speech parameter files, two compression methods are provided. For LP coding only, the IREFC parameter kind exploits the fact that the reflection coefficients are bounded by and hence they can be stored as scaled integers such that +1.0 is stored as 32767 and -1.0 is stored as -32767. For other types of parameterisation, a more general compression facility indicated by the _C  qualifier is used. HTK compressed parameter files consist of a set of compressed parameter vectors stored as shorts such that for parameter x

The coefficients A and B are defined as

where is the maximum value of parameter x in the whole file and is the corresponding minimum. I is the maximum range of a 2-byte integer i.e. 32767. The values of A and B are stored as two floating point vectors prepended to the start of the file immediately after the header.

When a HTK tool writes out a speech file to external storage, no further signal conversions are performed. Thus, for most purposes, the target parameter kind specifies both the required internal representation and the form of the written output, if any. However, there is a distinction in the way that the external data is actually stored. Firstly, it can be compressed as described above by setting the configuration parameter SAVECOMPRESSED to true. If the target kind is LPREFC then this compression is implemented by converting to IREFC otherwise the general compression algorithm described above is used. Secondly, in order to avoid data corruption problems, externally stored HTK parameter files can have a cyclic redundancy checksum appended. This is indicated by the qualifier _K  and it is generated by setting the configuration parameter SAVEWITHCRC to true. The principle tool which uses these output conversions is HCOPY (see section 5.13).