LINEAR TRAJECTORY SEGMENTAL HMMS

Segmental hidden Markov models (HMM's) are extended versions of conven tional HMM's in which states are associated with sequences of observat ion vectors rather than individual vectors, By treating a segment as a homogeneous unit, dependencies between vectors within a segment can b e modeled explicitly. This letter describes a segmental HMM in which a segment is modeled as a noisy function of a linear trajectory. The ba sic theory of the model is presented, together with formulae for model parameter optimization.