• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.64-70
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• 2009

This paper presents a speech enhancement technique based on generalized Gamma distribution in order to obtain robust speech recognition performance. For robust speech enhancement, the noise estimation based on a spectral noise floor controled recursive averaging spectral values is applied to speech estimation under the generalized Gamma distribution and spectral gain floor. The proposed speech enhancement technique is based on spectral component, spectral amplitude, and log spectral amplitude. The performance of three different methods is measured by recognition accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR).

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.2E
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• pp.86-99
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• 2010

This paper analyzes the performance of various single channel speech enhancement algorithms when they are applied to automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems as a preprocessor. The functional modules of speech enhancement systems are first divided into four major modules such as a gain estimator, a noise power spectrum estimator, a priori signal to noise ratio (SNR) estimator, and a speech absence probability (SAP) estimator. We investigate the relationship between speech recognition accuracy and the roles of each module. Simulation results show that the Wiener filter outperforms other gain functions such as minimum mean square error-short time spectral amplitude (MMSE-STSA) and minimum mean square error-log spectral amplitude (MMSE-LSA) estimators when a perfect noise estimator is applied. When the performance of the noise estimator degrades, however, MMSE methods including the decision directed module to estimate a priori SNR and the SAP estimation module helps to improve the performance of the enhancement algorithm for speech recognition systems.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.239-240
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• 2009

We live in a flat world in which globalization fosters communication, travel, and trade among more than 150 countries and thousands of languages. To surmount the barriers among these languages, translation is required; Speech-to-Speech translation will automate the process. Thanks to recent advances in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Machine Translation (MT), and Text-to-Speech (TTS), one can now utilize a system to translate a speech of source language to a speech of target language and vice versa in affordable manner. The three phase process establishes that the source speech be transcribed into a (set of) text of the source language (ASR) before the source text is translated into the target text (MT). Finally, the target speech is synthesized from the target text (TTS).

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.462-472
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• 2004

In this paper a method for compensating for thp performance degradation or automatic speech recognition (ASR) is proposed. which is mainly caused by speaking rate variation. Before the new method is proposed. quantitative analysis of the performance of an HMM-based ASR system according to speaking rate is first performed. From this analysis, significant performance degradation was often observed in the rapidly speaking speech signals. A quantitative measure is then introduced, which is able to represent speaking rate. Time scale modification (TSM) is employed to compensate the speaking rate difference between input speech signals and training speech signals. Finally, a method for compensating the performance degradation caused by speaking rate variation is proposed, in which TSM is selectively employed according to speaking rate. By the results from the ASR experiments devised for the 10-digits mobile phone number, it is confirmed that the error rate was reduced by 15.5% when the proposed method is applied to the high speaking rate speech signals.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.28-32
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• 2009

This paper compares two speech estimators under a generalized Gamma distribution for DFT-based single-microphone speech enhancement methods. For the speech enhancement, the noise estimation based on recursive averaging spectral values by spectral minimum noise is applied to two speech estimators based on the generalized Gamma distribution using $\kappa$=1 or $\kappa$=2. The performance of two speech enhancement algorithms is measured by recognition accuracy of automatic speech recognition(ASR) in car noisy environment.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.164-170
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• 2013

Recent years have been higher demands for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems that are able to operate robustly in an acoustically noisy environment. This paper proposes an improved product hidden markov model (HMM) used for bimodal speech recognition. A two-dimensional training model is built based on dependently trained audio-HMM and visual-HMM, reflecting the asynchronous characteristics of the audio and video streams. A weight coefficient is introduced to adjust the weight of the video and audio streams automatically according to differences in the noise environment. Experimental results show that compared with other bimodal speech recognition approaches, this approach obtains better speech recognition performance.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.88-95
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• 2006

In this Paper. a method for improving the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for conversational speech is proposed. which mainly focuses on increasing the robustness against the rapidly speaking utterances. The proposed method doesn't require an additional speech recognition task to represent speaking rate quantitatively. Energy distribution for special bands is employed to detect the vowel regions, the number of vowels Per unit second is then computed as speaking rate. To improve the Performance for fast speech. in the pervious methods. a sequence of the feature vectors is expanded by a given scaling factor, which is computed by a ratio between the standard phoneme duration and the measured one. However, in the method proposed herein. utterances are classified by their speaking rates. and the scaling factor is determined individually for each class. In this procedure, a maximum likelihood criterion is employed. By the results from the ASR experiments devised for the 10-digits mobile phone number. it is confirmed that the overall error rate was reduced by $17.8\%$ when the proposed method is employed

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.123-134
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• 2005

Confidence measure (CM) is used for the rejection of mis-recognized words in an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. Rahim, Lee, Juang and Cho's confidence measure (RLJC-CM) is one of the widely-used CMs [1]. The RLJC-CM is calculated by averaging phone-level CMs. An extension of the RLJC-CM was achieved by Kim et al [2]. They devised the normalized CM (NCM), which is a statistically normalized version of the RLJC-CM by using the tri-phone based CM normalization. In this paper we verify the NCM by generalizing tri-phone to n-phone unit. To apply various units for the normalization, mono-phone, tri-phone, quin-phone and $\infty$-phone are tested. By the experiments in the domain of the isolated word recognition we show that tri-phone based normalization is sufficient enough to enhance the rejection performance of the ASR system. Also we explain the NCM in regard to two class pattern classification problems.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.761-772
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• 2020

This paper presents an automatic proficiency assessment method for a non-native Korean read utterance using bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM)-based acoustic models (AMs) and speech data augmentation techniques. Specifically, the proposed method considers two scenarios, with and without prompted text. The proposed method with the prompted text performs (a) a speech feature extraction step, (b) a forced-alignment step using a native AM and non-native AM, and (c) a linear regression-based proficiency scoring step for the five proficiency scores. Meanwhile, the proposed method without the prompted text additionally performs Korean speech recognition and a subword un-segmentation for the missing text. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method with prompted text improves the performance for all scores when compared to a method employing conventional AMs. In addition, the proposed method without the prompted text has a fluency score performance comparable to that of the method with prompted text.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.83-90
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• 2007

One result of the trend towards globalization is an increased number of projects that focus on natural language processing. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies, for example, hold great promise in facilitating global communications and collaborations. Unfortunately, to date, most research projects focus on single widely spoken languages. Therefore, the cost to adapt a particular ASR tool for use with other languages is often prohibitive. This work takes a more general approach. We propose an International Phoneticizing Engine (IPE) that interprets input files supplied in our Phonetic Language Identity (PLI) format to build a dictionary. IPE is language independent and rule based. It operates by decomposing the dictionary creation process into a set of well-defined steps. These steps reduce rule conflicts, allow for rule creation by people without linguistics training, and optimize run-time efficiency. Dictionaries created by the IPE can be used with the speech recognition system. IPE defines an easy-to-use systematic approach that can obtained 92.55% for the recognition rate of Korean speech and 89.93% for English.