1. Introduction

1.1 What is SPro?		What is SPro good for?
1.2 How to read this manual?		How to read this document?
1.3 Installing SPro		SPro installation
1.4 Reporting bugs
1.5 Contributors		People who contributed

1.1 What is SPro?

SPro is a speech signal processing toolkit which provides runtime commands implementing standard feature extraction algorithms for speech and speaker recognition applications and a C library to implement new algorithms and to use SPro files within your own programs.

SPro was originally designed for variable resolution spectral analysis but also provides for feature extraction techniques classically used in speech applications. There are commands for the following representations:

• filter-bank energies
• cepstral coefficients (filter-bank or linear prediction)
• linear prediction derived representation (prediction and reflection coefficients, log area ratios and line spectrum pairs)

Though the toolkit has been designed as a front-end for applications such as speech or speaker recognition, we believe the library provides enough possibilities to implement various feature extraction algorithms easily (e.g. zero crossing rate). However, no command for such features is provided.

The library, written in ANSI C, provides functions for the following:

• waveform signal input
• low-level signal processing (FFT, LPC analysis, etc.)
• low-level feature processing (lifter, CMS, variance normalization, deltas, etc.)
• feature I/O

1.2 How to read this manual?

The manual is divided into three main parts:

1. user manual
2. programmer manual
3. reference manual

3. The SPro tools is the user manual. It provides a description of the speech analysis algorithms involved (see section 2. Speech analysis techniques) and explains in details the use and the implementation of the SPro commands sfbank, sfbcep, slpc, slpcep and scopy. 3.1 File formats describes the supported waveform file formats and the SPro feature file format. The next sections are dedicated to the detailed description of the SPro tools.

4. The SPro library is the programmer manual which describes the library main data structures and the associated functions.

5. Quick reference guide provides a quick reference manual for the SPro tools syntax.

If you have been using a former version of SPro, read 6.3 Compatibility carefully for crucial information on the (in)compatibility of SPro 4.0 with the previous versions.

Finally, to learn more about the evolution of SPro, the history of the various SPro releases is detailed in 6. Changes.

1.3 Installing SPro

Installation follows the standard GNU installation procedure. The two following lines in your favorite shell

./configure make

will build the library and the runtimes. SPro supports some extra features based on some external packages. These features can be turned on/off (depending on whether you have them already installed on your machine) using the `--with-xxx' options of the configure script. Supported enable options are:

--with-sphere[=path] SPHERE 2.6 file format support

If the SPHERE library is installed in a standard place on your system (e.g. `/usr/local/include' and `/usr/local/lib'), there is no need to specify path. Otherwise, path should point to the directory where the SPHERE library has been installed. configure will search for the library includes in path/include and for the archives in path/lib. Compiling SPro with the `-O3' option of the gcc compiler (CFLAGS=-O3) is a good idea for sake of rapidity.

Before installing, you may want to check your build by typing

make check

Finally, installing the library, the runtimes and the info documentation can be done running

make install

The installation path is specified by the configuration script (try ./configure --help for details) and defaults to `/usr/local'.

See file `INSTALL' in the distribution top directory for more details.

To the author knowledge, SPro has been successfully build and used on Linux, SPARC/SunOS, and HP-UX. It should also work on AIX though this has not been tested so far.

1.4 Reporting bugs

Bugs should be reported to ggravier@irisa.fr. Feel free to submit a diagnostic or even a patch along with your bug report if you kindly bothered to do the trouble-shooting. This is always appreciated.

1.5 Contributors

Along the years, SPro has benefited from the help of several contributors. Here is a list, in alphabetical order, of the main contributors: Raphaël Blouet, Pierre Duhamel, Johnny Mariethoz, Sylvain Meigner, Alexey Ozerov and Jacques Prado.