• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.70-76
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• 2009

In speech communications in noisy environments, speech intelligibility is seriously degraded due to the masking effect of ambient noise. In this paper, a new method to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments is proposed. Based on the perception theory that the temporal envelope plays a major role in determining intelligibility, the proposed method uses a novel operation that enhances the fluctuation of band-wise temporal envelope and also contains pitch enhancement for improving speech naturalness. In addition, a new subjective evaluation scheme employing binaural listening is proposed in order to measure more reliable performance. The subjective performance measured with the proposed scheme shows that the proposed method improves both intelligibility and naturalness in various environments, whereas a function parameter can control the performance trade-off between intelligibility and naturalness.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.11-16
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• 2013

This paper proposes robust feature extraction for accurate voice activity detection (VAD). VAD is one of the principal modules for speech signal processing such as speech codec, speech enhancement, and speech recognition. Noisy environments contain nonstationary noises causing the accuracy of the VAD to drastically decline because the fluctuation of features in the noise intervals results in increased false alarm rates. In this paper, in order to improve the VAD performance, harmonic-weighted energy is proposed. This feature extraction method focuses on voiced speech intervals and weighted harmonic-to-noise ratios to determine the amount of the harmonicity to frame energy. For performance evaluation, the receiver operating characteristic curves and equal error rate are measured.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.08a
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• pp.225-230
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• 1998

In this paper, a Kalman filter approach for enhancing speech signals degraded by statistically independent additive nonstationary noise is developed. The autoregressive hidden markov model is used for modeling the statistical characteristics of both the clean speech signal and the nonstationary noise process. In this case, the speech enhancement comprises a weighted sum of conditional mean estimators for the composite states of the models for the speech and noise, where the weights equal to the posterior probabilities of the composite states, given the noisy speech. The conditional mean estimators use a smoothing spproach based on two Kalmean filters with Markovian switching coefficients, where one of the filters propagates in the forward-time direction with one frame. The proposed method is tested against the noisy speech signals degraded by Gaussian colored noise or nonstationary noise at various input signal-to-noise ratios. An app개ximate improvement of 4.7-5.2 dB is SNR is achieved at input SNR 10 and 15 dB. Also, in a comparison of conventional and the proposed methods, an improvement of the about 0.3 dB in SNR is obtained with our proposed method.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.191-199
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a MWF-PMC noise processing method which enhances the input speech by using Mel-warped Wiener Filtering (MWF) at pre-processing stage and compensates the recognition model by using PMC (Parallel Model Combination) at post-processing stage for speech recognition in noisy environments. The PMC uses the residual noise extracted from the silence region of enhanced speech at pre-processing stage to compensate the clean speech model and thus this method is considered to improve the performance of speech recognition in noisy environments. For recognition experiments we dew.-sampled KLE PBW (Phoneme Balanced Words) 452 word speech data to 8kHz and made 5 different SNR levels of noisy speech, i.e., 0dB. 5dB, 10dB, 15dB and 20dB, by adding Subway, Car and Exhibition noise to clean speech. From the recognition results, we could confirm the effectiveness of the proposed MWF-PMC method by obtaining the improved recognition performances over all compared with the existing combined methods.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.1673-1678
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• 2016

In the area of the speech recognition processing, background noises are caused the incorrect response to the speech input, therefore the speech recognition rates are decreased by the background noises. Accordingly, a more high level noise processing techniques are required since these kinds of noise countermeasures are not simple. Therefore, this paper proposes an algorithm to distinguish between the stationary background noises or non-stationary background noises and the speech signal having short time duration in the noisy environments. The proposed algorithm uses the characteristic parameter of the improved speech signal as an important measure in order to distinguish different types of the background noises and the speech signals. Next, this algorithm estimates various kinds of the background noises using a multi-layer perceptron neural network. In this experiment, it was experimentally clear the estimation of the background noises and the speech signals.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.141-148
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• 2010

In this paper, voice activity detection (VAD) for dual-channel noisy speech recognition is proposed in which spatial cues are employed. In the proposed method, a probability model for speech presence/absence is constructed using spatial cues obtained from dual-channel input signal, and a speech activity interval is detected through this probability model. In particular, spatial cues are composed of interaural time differences and interaural level differences of dual-channel speech signals, and the probability model for speech presence/absence is based on a Gaussian kernel density. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed VAD method, speech recognition is performed for speech segments that only include speech intervals detected by the proposed VAD method. The performance of the proposed method is compared with those of several methods such as an SNR-based method, a direction of arrival (DOA) based method, and a phase vector based method. It is shown from the speech recognition experiments that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods by providing relative word error rates reductions of 11.68%, 41.92%, and 10.15% compared with SNR-based, DOA-based, and phase vector based method, respectively.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.8
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• pp.487-506
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• 2012

This paper proposes a speech enhancement algorithm to improve the speech intelligibility by suppressing both reverberation and background noise. The algorithm adopts a non-causal single-channel minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) filter to exploit an additional information that is included in the noisy-reverberant signals in subsequent frames. The noisy-reverberant signals are decomposed into the parts of the desired signal and the interference that is not correlated to the desired signal. Then, the filter equation is derived based on the MVDR criterion to minimize the residual interference without bringing speech distortion. The estimation of the correlation parameter, which plays an important role to determine the overall performance of the system, is mathematically derived based on the general statistical reverberation model. Furthermore, the practical implementation methods to estimate sub-parameters required to estimate the correlation parameter are developed. The efficiency of the proposed enhancement algorithm is verified by performance evaluation. From the results, the proposed algorithm achieves significant performance improvement in all studied conditions and shows the superiority especially for the severely noisy and strongly reverberant environment.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.167-170
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• 2014

In this letter, we propose an unsupervised framework for speech noise reduction based on the recent development of low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition. The proposed framework directly separates the speech signal from noisy speech by decomposing the noisy speech spectrogram into three submatrices: the noise structure matrix, the clean speech structure matrix, and the residual noise matrix. Evaluations on the Noisex-92 dataset show that the proposed method achieves a signal-to-distortion ratio approximately 2.48 dB and 3.23 dB higher than that of the robust principal component analysis method and the non-negative matrix factorization method, respectively, when the input SNR is -5 dB.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.263-277
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• 2003

One of major problems in speech recognition is performance degradation due to the mismatch between the training and test environments. Recently, Stereo-based Piecewise LInear Compensation for Environments (SPLICE), which is frame-based bias removal algorithm for cepstral enhancement using stereo training data and noisy speech model as a mixture of Gaussians, was proposed and showed good performance in noisy environments. In this paper, we propose several methods to improve the conventional SPLICE. First we apply Cepstral Mean Subtraction (CMS) as a preprocessor to SPLICE, instead of applying it as a postprocessor. Secondly, to compensate residual distortion after SPLICE processing, two-stage SPLICE is proposed. Thirdly we employ phonetic information for training SPLICE model. According to experiments on the Aurora 2 database, proposed method outperformed the conventional SPLICE and we achieved a 50% decrease in word error rate over the Aurora baseline system.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.277-283
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• 1997

In this paper, we present a robust recognition algorithm based on the Wiener filtering method as a research tool to develop the Korean Speech recognition system. We especially used Wiener filtering method in cepstrum-domain, because the method in frequency-domain is computationally expensive and complex. Evaluation of the effectiveness of this method has been conducted in speaker-independent isolated Korean digit recognition tasks using discrete HMM speech recognition systems. In these tasks, we used 12th order weighted cepstral as a feature vector and added computer simulated white gaussian noise of different levels to clean speech signals for recognition experiments under noisy conditions. Experimental results show that the presented algorithm can provide an improvement in recognition of as much as from $5\%\;to\;\20\%$ in comparison to spectral subtraction method.