VOICE SOURCE ESTIMATION USING SEQUENTIAL SVD AND EXTRACTION OF COMPOSITE SOURCE PARAMETERS USING EM ALGORITHM

  • Hong, Sung-Hoon (Department of Electronics Engineering Seoul National University) ;
  • Choi, Hong-Sub (Department of Electronics Engineering Seoul National University) ;
  • Ann, Sou-Guil (Department of Electronics Engineering Seoul National University)
  • Published : 1994.06.01

Abstract

In this paper, the influence of voice source estimation and modeling on speech synthesis and coding is examined and then their new estimation and modeling techniques are proposed and verified by computer simulation. It is known that the existing speech synthesizer produced the speech which is dull and inanimated. These problems are arised from the fact that existing estimation and modeling techniques can not give more accurate voice parameters. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new voice source estimation algorithm and modeling techniques which can not give more accurate voice parameters. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new voice source estimation algorithm and modeling techniques which can represent a variety of source characteristics. First, we divide speech samples in one pitch region into four parts having different characteristics. Second, the vocal-tract parameters and voice source waveforms are estimated in each regions differently using sequential SVD. Third, we propose composite source model as a new voice source model which is represented by weighted sum of pre-defined basis functions. And finally, the weights and time-shift parameters of the proposed composite source model are estimeted uning EM(estimate maximize) algorithm. Experimental results indicate that the proposed estimation and modeling methods can estimate more accurate voice source waveforms and represent various source characteristics.

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