13.2.2 Use

HCOMPV is invoked via the command line

   HCompV [options] hmm trainFiles ...

where hmm is the name of the physical HMM whose parameters are to be initialised. The effect of this command is to compute the covariance of the speech training data and then copy it into every Gaussian component of the given HMM definition. If there are multiple data streams, then a separate covariance is estimated for each stream. The HMM can have a mix of diagonal and full covariances and an option exists to update the means also. The HMM definition can be contained within one or more macro files loaded via the standard -H option. Otherwise, the definition will be read from a file called hmm. Any tyings in the input definition will be preserved in the output. By default, the new updated definition overwrites the existing one. However, a new definition file including any macro files can be created by specifying an appropriate target directory using the standard -M option.

In addition to the above, an option -f is provided to compute variance floor macros equal to a specified fraction of the global variance. In this case, the newly created macros are written to a file called vFloors. For each stream N defined for hmm, a variance macro called varFloorN is created. If a target directory is specified using the standard -M option then the new file will be written there, otherwise it is written in the current directory.

The list of train files can be stored in a script file if required. Furthermore, the data used for estimating the global covariance can be limited to that corresponding to a specified label.

The detailed operation of HCOMPV is controlled by the following command line options

-f f
Create variance floor macros with values equal to f times the global variance. One macro is created for each input stream and the output is stored in a file called vFloors.

-l s
The string s must be the name of a segment label. When this option is used, HCOMPV searches through all of the training files and uses only the speech frames from segments with the given label. When this option is not used, HCOMPV uses all of the data in each training file.

-m
The covariances of the output HMM are always updated however updating the means must be specifically requested. When this option is set, HCOMPV updates all the HMM component means with the sample mean computed from the training files.

-o s
The string s is used as the name of the output HMM in place of the source name.

-v f
This sets the minimum variance (i.e. diagonal elements of the covariance matrix) to the real value f (default value 0.0).

-B
Output HMM definition files in binary format.
-F fmt
Set the source data format to fmt.
-G fmt
Set the label file format to fmt.
-H mmf
Load HMM macro model file mmf. This option may be repeated to load multiple MMFs.
-I mlf
This loads the master label file mlf. This option may be repeated to load several MLFs.
-L dir
Search directory dir for label files (default is to search current directory).
-M dir
Store output HMM macro model files in the directory dir. If this option is not given, the new HMM definition will overwrite the existing one.
-X ext
Set label file extension to ext (default is lab).

HCOMPV also supports the standard options -A, -C, -D, -S, -T, and -V as described in section 4.4.