21. The speech analysis system of claim 18 , wherein the spectral estimation component further comprises: a prior probability table configured to store prior conditional probabilities of first spectral parameters following second spectral parameters.
18. A speech analysis system comprising: a plurality of sensors for receiving signals; a sampler configured to sample and quantize the signals to form a sampled signal; and a spectral estimation component configured to estimate spectral parameters corresponding to speech of a talker, the spectral estimation component including: a codebook configured to store parameters corresponding to a plurality of hypothesized spectral envelopes, and a discriminant function calculation component configured to evaluate a likelihood of the hypothesized spectral envelopes corresponding to the speech of the talker based on application of a discriminant function evaluated using a preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) process configured for block Toeplitz type matrices with a block size corresponding to the number of sensors.