• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.3E
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• pp.3-11
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• 1998

Zero-crossings with Peak amplitudes (ZCPA) model motivated by human auditory periphery was proposed to extract reliable features form speech signals even in noisy environments for robust speech recognition. In this paper, the performance of the ZCPA model is further improved by incorporating conventional speech processing techniques into the model output. Spectral and cepstral representations of the ZCPA model output are compared, and the incorporation of dynamic features with several different lengths of time-derivative window are evaluated. Also, comparative evaluations with other front-ends in real-world noisy environments are performed, and result in the superiority of the ZCPA model.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.1E
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• pp.15-23
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• 1997

Zero-Crossings with Peak Amplitudes(ZCPA) model motivated by human auditory periphery was proposed to extract reliable features speech signals even in noisy environments for robust speech recognition. In this paper, some practical considerations for digital hardware implementations of the ZCPA model are addressed and evaluated for recognition of speech corrupted by several real world noises as well as white Gaussian noise. Infinite impulse response(IIR) filters which constitute the cochliar filterbank of the ZCPA are replaced by hamming bandpass filters of which frequency responses are less similar to biological neural tuning curves. Experimental results demonstrate that the detailed frequency response of the cochlear filters are not critical to performance. Also, the sensitivity of the model output to the variations in microphone gain is investigated, and results in good reliability of the ZCPA model.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.292-299
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• 2007

In this paper, we present a speech recognition system using a throat microphone. The use of this kind of microphone minimizes the impact of environmental noise. Due to the absence of high frequencies and the partial loss of formant frequencies, previous systems using throat microphones have shown a lower recognition rate than systems which use standard microphones. To develop a high performance automatic speech recognition (ASR) system using only a throat microphone, we propose two methods. First, based on Korean phonological feature theory and a detailed throat signal analysis, we show that it is possible to develop an ASR system using only a throat microphone, and propose conditions of the feature extraction algorithm. Second, we optimize the zero-crossing with peak amplitude (ZCPA) algorithm to guarantee the high performance of the ASR system using only a throat microphone. For ZCPA optimization, we propose an intensification of the formant frequencies and a selection of cochlear filters. Experimental results show that this system yields a performance improvement of about 4% and a reduction in time complexity of 25% when compared to the performance of a standard ZCPA algorithm on throat microphone signals.

• 한국HCI학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.02a
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• pp.565-570
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• 2006

웨어러블 환경에서 가장 유용한 사용자 인터페이스는 음성이다. 그러나 현재 노이즈 제거 기술로는 웨어러블 환경과 같은 고소음 환경에서 음성 인식기의 실제적인 응용은 거의 불가능하다. 본 논문은 환경노이즈를 원천적으로 차단하는 성대 마이크를 이용한 명령어 인식기를 개발한다. 이를 위해 성대신호를 한국어 음운자질 이론을 기반으로 설명하고, 입력신호를 분석하여 이러한 접근방법의 타당성을 검증한다. 이러한 성대신호의 분석을 위해 스펙트럼과, FFT 결과를 사용하고, MFCC 알고리즘을 이용하여 주파수 영역내의 정보량이 인식에 미치는 영향을 분석한다. 그리고 분석결과를 바탕으로 성대신호 명령어 인식기를 위한 특징벡터로 유/무성음 분리에 사용되는 특징벡터가 유용함을 ZCPA 알고리즘을 이용한 성대신호 명령어 인식기를 개발하여 검증한다. 실험결과 ZCPA 를 사용한 것이 MFCC 에 비해 16%높은 인식률을 보인다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.148-155
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• 2008

In this paper, we constructed the noise robust content-based music retrieval system in mobile environment. The performance of the proposed system was verified with ZCPA feature which is blown to have noise robust characteristic in speech recognition application. In addition, new indexing and fast retrieval method are proposed to improve retrieval speed about 99% compare to exhaustive retrieval for large music DB. From the computer simulation results in noise environment of 15dB - 0dB SNR, we confirm the superior performance of the proposed system about 5% - 30% compared to MFCC and FBE(filter bank energy) feature.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.107-114
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• 2008

In this paper, we constructed a speech emotion recognition system that classifies four emotions - neutral, happy, sad, and anger from speech based on male/female gender discrimination. At first, the proposed system distinguish between male and female from a queried speech, then the system performance can be improved by using separate optimized feature vectors for each gender for the emotion classification. As a emotion feature vector, this paper adopts ZCPA(Zero Crossings with Peak Amplitudes) which is well known for its noise-robustic characteristic from the speech recognition area and the features are optimized using SFS method. For a pattern classification of emotion, k-NN and SVM classifiers are compared experimentally. From the computer simulation results, the proposed system was proven to be highly efficient for speech emotion classification about 85.3% regarding four emotion states. This might promise the use the proposed system in various applications such as call-center, humanoid robots, ubiquitous, and etc.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.226-234
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• 2007

In this paper, we develop a speech recognition system using a throat microphone. The use of this kind of microphone minimizes the impact of environmental noise. However, because of the absence of high frequencies and the partially loss of formant frequencies, previous systems developed with those devices have shown a lower recognition rate than systems which use standard microphone signals. This problem has led to researchers using throat microphone signals as supplementary data sources supporting standard microphone signals. In this paper, we present a high performance ASR system which we developed using only a throat microphone by taking advantage of Korean Phonological Feature Theory and a detailed throat signal analysis. Analyzing the spectrum and the result of FFT of the throat microphone signal, we find that the conventional MFCC feature vector that uses a critical pass filter does not characterize the throat microphone signals well. We also describe the conditions of the feature extraction algorithm which make it best suited for throat microphone signal analysis. The conditions involve (1) a sensitive band-pass filter and (2) use of feature vector which is suitable for voice/non-voice classification. We experimentally show that the ZCPA algorithm designed to meet these conditions improves the recognizer's performance by approximately 16%. And we find that an additional noise-canceling algorithm such as RAST A results in 2% more performance improvement.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2005.10b
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• pp.216-218
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• 2005

This paper present a new approach to a noise robust recognizer for WPS interface. In noisy environments, performance of speech recognition is decreased rapidly. To solve this problem, We propose the recognition system using vocal-cord signal instead of speech. Vocal-cord signal has low quality but it is more robust to environment noise than speech signal. As a result, we obtained 75.21% accuracy using MFCC with CMS and 83.72% accuracy using ZCPA with RASTA.