Speech and Vision Lab

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization that occurs often in speech communication. Since laughter is produced by the speech pro- duction mechanism, spectral analysis methods are used mostly for the study of laughter acoustics. In this paper the significance of excitation features for discriminating laughter and speech is discussed. New features describing the excitation characteris- tics are used to analyze the laugh signals. The features are based on instantaneous pitch and strength of excitation at epochs. An algorithm is developed based on these features to detect laugh- ter regions in continuous speech. The results are illustrated by detecting laughter regions in a TV broadcast program.