Phonetics and Speech Sciences (말소리와 음성과학)

Korean Society of Speech Sciences (한국음성학회)
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Syllable-Type-Based Phoneme Weighting Techniques for Listening Intelligibility in Noisy Environments

소음 환경에서의 명료한 청취를 위한 음절형태 기반 음소 가중 기술

  • Received : 2014.08.14
  • Accepted : 2014.09.22
  • Published : 2014.09.30
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Abstract

Intelligibility of speech transmitted to listeners can significantly be degraded in noisy environments such as in auditorium and in train station due to ambient noises. Noise-masked speech signal is hard to be recognized by listeners. Among the conventional methods to improve speech intelligibility, consonant-vowel intensity ratio (CVR) approach reinforces the powers of overall consonants. However, excessively reinforced consonant is not helpful in recognition. Furthermore, only some of consonants are improved by the CVR approach. In this paper, we propose the corrective weighting (CW) approach that reinforces the powers of consonants according to syllable-type such as consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC), consonant-vowel (CV) and vowel-consonant (VC) in Korean differently, considering the level of listeners' recognition. The proposed CW approach was evaluated by the subjective test, Comparison Category Rating (CCR) test of ITU-T P.800, showed better performance, that is, 0.18 and 0.24 higher than the unprocessed CVR approach, respectively.

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References

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