• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.35S no.12
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• pp.93-102
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• 1998

In noisy environments, human speech productions are influenced by noises(Lombard effect), and speech signals are contaminated. These distortions dramatically reduce the performance of speech recognition systems. This paper proposes a method of the Lombard effect compensation and noise suppression in order to improve speech recognition performance in noise environments. To estimate the intensity of the Lombard effect which is a nonlinear distortion depending on the ambient noise levels, speakers, and phonetic units, we formulate the measure of the Lombard effect level based on the acoustic speech signal, and the measure is used to compensate the Lombard effect. The distortions of speech under noisy environments are cancelled out as follows. First, spectral subtraction and band-pass filtering are used to cancel out noise. Second, energy nomalization is proposed to cancel out the variation of vocal intensity by the Lombard effect. Finally, the Lombard effect level controls the transform which converts Lombard speech cepstrum to clean speech cepstrum. The proposed method was validated on 50 korean word recognition. Average recognition rates were 82.6%, 95.7%, 97.6% with the proposed method, while 46.3%, 75.5%, 87.4% without any compensation at SNR 0, 10, 20 dB, respectively.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.6 no.12
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• pp.89-95
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• 2006

The performance of blind source separation(BSS) using independent component analysis (ICA) declines significantly in a reverberant environment. A post-processing method proposed in this paper was designed to remove the residual component precisely. The proposed method used modified NLMS(normalized least mean square) filter in frequency domain, to estimate cross-talk path that causes residual cross-talk components. Residual cross-talk components in one channel is correspond to direct components in another channel. Therefore, we can estimate cross-talk path using another channel input signals from adaptive filter. Step size is normalized by input signal power in conventional NLMS filter, but it is normalized by sum of input signal power and error signal power in modified NLMS filter. By using this method, we can prevent misadjustment of filter weights. The estimated residual cross-talk components are subtracted by non-stationary spectral subtraction. The computer simulation results using speech signals show that the proposed method improves the noise reduction ratio(NRR) by approximately 3dB on conventional FDICA.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.36S no.9
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• pp.103-112
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• 1999

In this paper, a speaker-independent isolated world recognition system for a car navigation system is implemented using a general digital signal processor. This paper presents a method combining SNR normalization with RAS as a noise processing method. The semi-continuous hidden markov model is adopted and TMS320C31 is used in implementing the real-time system. Recognition word set is composed of 69 command words for a car navigation system. Experimental results showed that the recognition performance has a maximum of 93.62% in case of a combination of SNR normalization and spectral subtraction, and the performance improvement rate of the system is 3.69%, Presented noise processing method showed good speech recognition performance in 5dB SNR in car environment.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.11 no.10
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• pp.10-19
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• 2021

In this paper, we tried to derive characteristic parameters that reflect mental fatigue through EEG measurement and analysis. For this purpose, mental fatigue was induced through a resting state with eyes closed and performing subtraction operations in mental arithmetic for 30 minutes. Five subjects participated in the experiment, and all subjects were right-handed male students in university, with an average age of 25.5 years. Spectral analysis was performed on the EEG collected at the beginning and the end of the experiment to derive feature parameters reflecting mental fatigue. As a result of the analysis, the absolute power of the alpha band in the occipital lobe and the temporal lobe increased as the mental fatigue increased, while the relative power decreased. Also, the difference in power between resting state and task state showed that the relative power was larger than the absolute power. These results indicate that alpha relative power in the occipital lobe and temporal lobe is a feature parameter reflecting mental fatigue. The results of this study can be utilized as feature parameters for the development of an automated system for mental fatigue determination such as fatigue and drowsiness while driving.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.270-277
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• 2010

In this paper, we proposed an algorithm that improves tone quality of noisy audio signals by using ICA(Independent Component Analysis) algorithm and perceptual filters. Many algorithms have been proposed to eliminate the noise from the audio signals, such as spectral subtraction method, perceptual filter, etc. The perceptual filter uses a noise that is acquired from silent ranges in the input signal. In this case, the improvement rate of tone quality decreases if the noise energy is changed by the environmental variation in a signal frame. But the proposed method estimates a noise that is changed at each frame using ICA algorithm. The estimated noise is applied to perceptual filter. To show the performance of the proposed algorithm, several tests are performed to various input signals. With the proposed algorithm, we could confirm the enhancement of tone quality in terms of segmental SNR (SSNR), noise-to-mask ratio (NMR) and Degradation Category Rating (DCR) test.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.425-430
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• 2001

The Purpose of this study was to find the way of discriminating EEG for some mental activity. which are not characterized within linear spectral analysis but with non-linear analysis . We lave investigated the way of characterizing EEG changes during emotional and cognitive states in healthy volunteered subjects who responded to three designed status. in which the subjects were relaxing with ease and eyes closed. listening to music and computing a simple subtraction with eyes closed. Especially, we estimated EEG dimensional complexity by Skinner s Point-wise correlation dimension(PD2) method for each mental states. As a result it has been found that the subjects, who responded that the\ulcorner had concentrated well during the arithmetic task. show higher PD2 in their non-linear EEG measures. in comparison with the subjects who responded that they had not concentrated during the task This highness of PD2 is also significant in statistical analysis. A subject who had the highest score in evaluating the intensity of induced emotion during emotional task shows significantly lower PD2 in statistical analysis than other subjects who had lower scores. Linear spectral analysis was also performed on these data. However, they did not show and significant difference. Only non-linear dynamical analysis shows the significant different result on these mental status.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.8
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• pp.383-388
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• 2006

This Paper presents a novel approach to single channel microphone speech enhancement in noisy environments. Widely used noise reduction techniques based on the spectral subtraction are generally expressed as a spectral gam depending on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The well-known decision-directed(DD) estimator of Ephraim and Malah efficiently reduces musical noise under the background noise conditions, but generates the delay of the a prioiri SNR because the DD weights the speech spectrum component of the Previous frame in the speech signal. Therefore, the noise suppression gain which is affected by the delay of the a priori SNR, which is estimated by the DD matches the previous frame rather than the current one, so after noise suppression. this degrades the noise reduction performance during speech transient periods. We propose a computationally simple but effective speech enhancement technique based on the sigmoid type function for the weight Parameter of the DD. The proposed approach solves the delay problem about the main parameter, the a priori SNR of the DD while maintaining the benefits of the DD. Performances of the proposed enhancement algorithm are evaluated by ITU-T p.862 Perceptual Evaluation of Speech duality (PESQ). the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and the speech spectrogram under various noise environments and yields better results compared with the fixed weight parameter of the DD.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.77-83
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• 2009

This paper proposes a new noise-biased compensation of minimum statistics(MS) method using a nonlinear function and a priori speech absence probability(SAP) for speech enhancement in non-stationary noisy environments. The minimum statistics(MS) method is well known technique for noise power estimation in non-stationary noisy environments. It tends to bias the noise estimate below that of true noise level. The proposed method is combined with an adaptive parameter based on a sigmoid function and a priori speech absence probability (SAP) for biased compensation. Specifically. we apply the adaptive parameter according to the a posteriori SNR. In addition, when the a priori SAP equals unity, the adaptive biased compensation factor separately increases ${\delta}_{max}$ each frequency bin, and vice versa. We evaluate the estimation of noise power capability in highly non-stationary and various noise environments, the improvement in the segmental signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and the Itakura-Saito Distortion Measure (ISDM) integrated into a spectral subtraction (SS). The results shows that our proposed method is superior to the conventional MS approach.