• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2003.11b
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• pp.215-218
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• 2003

The method of vocal tract normalization has been known as a successful method for improving the accuracy of speech recognition. A frequency warping procedure based low complexity and maximum likelihood has been generally applied for vocal tract normalization. In this paper, we propose a new power spectrum warping procedure that can be improve on vocal tract normalization performance than a frequency warping procedure. A mechanism for implementing this method can be simply achieved by modifying the power spectrum of filter bank in Mel-frequency cepstrum feature(MFCC) analysis. Experimental study compared our Proposal method with the well-known frequency warping method. The results have shown that the power spectrum warping is better 50% about the recognition performance than the frequency warping.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.7 no.7
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• pp.1380-1386
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• 2003

Speech recognition performance is degraded by the variation in vocal tract length among speakers. In this paper, we have used a vocal tract length normalization method wherein the frequency axis of the short-time spectrum associated with a speaker's speech is scaled to minimize the effects of speaker's vocal tract length on the speech recognition performance In order to normalize vocal tract length, we tried several frequency warping functions such as linear and piece-wise linear function. Variable interval piece-wise linear warping function is proposed to effectively model the variation of frequency axis scale due to the large variation of vocal tract length. Experimental results on TIDIGITS connected digits showed the dramatic reduction of word error rates from 2.15% to 0.53% by the proposed vocal tract normalization.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.9-14
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• 2003

The method of vocal tract normalization is a successful method for improving the accuracy of inter-speaker normalization. In this paper, we present an intra-speaker warping factor estimation based on pitch alteration utterance. The feature space distributions of untransformed speech from the pitch alteration utterance of intra-speaker would vary due to the acoustic differences of speech produced by glottis and vocal tract. The variation of utterance is two types: frequency and amplitude variation. The vocal tract normalization is frequency normalization among inter-speaker normalization methods. Therefore, we have to consider amplitude variation, and it may be possible to determine the amplitude warping factor by calculating the inverse ratio of input to reference pitch. k, the recognition results, the error rate is reduced from 0.4% to 2.3% for digit and word decoding.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.773-778
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• 2009

This paper studied the training methods less affected by the emotional variation for the development of the robust speech recognition system. For this purpose, the effect of emotional variations on the speech signal were studied using speech database containing various emotions. The performance of the speech recognition system trained by using the speech signal containing no emotion is deteriorated if the test speech signal contains the emotions because of the emotional difference between the test and training data. In this study, it is observed that vocal tract length of the speaker is affected by the emotional variation and this effect is one of the reasons that makes the performance of the speech recognition system worse. In this paper, vocal tract normalization method is used to develop the robust speech recognition system for emotional variations. Experimental results from the isolated word recognition using HMM showed that the vocal tract normalization method reduced the error rate of the conventional recognition system by 41.9% when emotional test data was used.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2001.09a
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• pp.499-502
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• 2001

본 연구에서는 화자에 따라 서로 다른 성도의 길이에 의해 발생하는 음성인식 시스템의 성능 저하를 줄이기 위하여, VTN(Vocal Tract Normalization)을 음성인식 시스템에 적용하고, 주소 인식 실험을 통하여 인식 성능을 평가하였다. 또, VTN을 CMN과 동시에 적용하여 인식 실험을 하였다. 실험에서는 화자간 성도길이의 차이를 반영하기 위하여 13개의 Warping 계수에 대해 필터 뱅크를 이용한 선형 Warping 방법을 적용하였다. 실험결과, Baseline 인식 시스템에 비하여 VTN을 적용하면, WER(Word Error Rate)이 1.24% 감소하였고, CMN과 VTN을 동시에 적용한 실험에서는 Baseline 인식 시스템과 비교하여 WER이 0.33% 감소 하였지만 VTN을 적용한 실험결과와 비교하면 오히려 0.91% 증가하였다.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.681-686
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• 2012

This paper studied the speech parameters less affected by the human emotion for the development of the robust emotional speech recognition system. For this purpose, the effect of emotion on the speech recognition system and robust speech parameters of speech recognition system were studied using speech database containing various emotions. In this study, mel-cepstral coefficient, delta-cepstral coefficient, RASTA mel-cepstral coefficient, root-cepstral coefficient, PLP coefficient and frequency warped mel-cepstral coefficient in the vocal tract length normalization method were used as feature parameters. And CMS (Cepstral Mean Subtraction) and SBR(Signal Bias Removal) method were used as a signal bias removal technique. Experimental results showed that the HMM based speaker independent word recognizer using frequency warped RASTA mel-cepstral coefficient in the vocal tract length normalized method, its derivatives and CMS as a signal bias removal showed the best performance.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.683-687
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• 2010

This paper studied some methods which use frequency warping method that is the one of the speech transformation method to develope the robust speech recognition system for the emotional variation. For this purpose, the effect of emotional variations on the speech signal were studied using speech database containing various emotions and it is observed that speech spectrum is affected by the emotional variation and this effect is one of the reasons that makes the performance of the speech recognition system worse. In this paper, new training method that uses frequency warping in training process is presented to reduce the effect of emotional variation and the speech recognition system based on vocal tract length normalization method is developed to be compared with proposed system. Experimental results from the isolated word recognition using HMM showed that new training method reduced the error rate of the conventional recognition system using speech signal containing various emotions.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.1137-1142
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• 2010

This paper studied the speech parameters less affected by the human emotion for the development of the robust speech recognition system. For this purpose, the effect of emotion on the speech recognition system and robust speech parameters of speech recognition system were studied using speech database containing various emotions. In this study, mel-cepstral coefficient, delta-cepstral coefficient, RASTA mel-cepstral coefficient and frequency warped mel-cepstral coefficient were used as feature parameters. And CMS (Cepstral Mean Subtraction) method were used as a signal bias removal technique. Experimental results showed that the HMM based speaker independent word recognizer using vocal tract length normalized mel-cepstral coefficient, its derivatives and CMS as a signal bias removal showed the best performance of 0.78% word error rate. This corresponds to about a 50% word error reduction as compare to the performance of baseline system using mel-cepstral coefficient, its derivatives and CMS.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2013

This paper proposes a new feature extraction algorithm to improve children's speech recognition in Korean. The proposed feature extraction algorithm combines three methods. The first method is on the vocal tract length normalization to compensate acoustic features because the vocal tract length in children is shorter than in adults. The second method is to use the uniform bandwidth because children's voice is centered on high spectral regions. Finally, the proposed algorithm uses a smoothing filter for a robust speech recognizer in real environments. This paper shows the new feature extraction algorithm improves the children's speech recognition performance.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.299-307
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• 2003

There have been many studies on speaker normalization which aims to minimize the effects of speaker's vocal tract length on the recognition performance of the speaker independent speech recognition system. In this paper, we propose a simple vector quantizer based linear warping speaker normalization method based on the observation that the vector quantizer can be successfully used for speaker verification. For this purpose, we firstly generate an optimal codebook which will be used as the basis of the speaker normalization, and then the warping factor of the unknown speaker will be extracted by comparing the feature vectors and the codebook. Finally, the extracted warping factor is used to linearly warp the Mel scale filter bank adopted in the course of MFCC calculation. To test the performance of the proposed method, a series of recognition experiments are conducted on discrete HMM with thirteen mono-syllabic Korean number utterances. The results showed that about 29% of word error rate can be reduced, and that the proposed warping factor extraction method is useful due to its simplicity compared to other line search warping methods.