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http://dx.doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2014.6.3.165

Syllable-Type-Based Phoneme Weighting Techniques for Listening Intelligibility in Noisy Environments  

Lee, Young Ho (서울과학기술대학교)
Joo, Jong Han (서울과학기술대학교)
Choi, Seung Ho (서울과학기술대학교)
Publication Information
Phonetics and Speech Sciences / v.6, no.3, 2014 , pp. 165-169 More about this Journal
Abstract
Intelligibility of speech transmitted to listeners can significantly be degraded in noisy environments such as in auditorium and in train station due to ambient noises. Noise-masked speech signal is hard to be recognized by listeners. Among the conventional methods to improve speech intelligibility, consonant-vowel intensity ratio (CVR) approach reinforces the powers of overall consonants. However, excessively reinforced consonant is not helpful in recognition. Furthermore, only some of consonants are improved by the CVR approach. In this paper, we propose the corrective weighting (CW) approach that reinforces the powers of consonants according to syllable-type such as consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC), consonant-vowel (CV) and vowel-consonant (VC) in Korean differently, considering the level of listeners' recognition. The proposed CW approach was evaluated by the subjective test, Comparison Category Rating (CCR) test of ITU-T P.800, showed better performance, that is, 0.18 and 0.24 higher than the unprocessed CVR approach, respectively.
Keywords
noisy environment; speech intelligibility; syllable types; consonant-vowel intensity ratio (CVR); corrective weighting (CW);
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