• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.1-7
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• 2021

This study aims to enhance English pronunciation education for Korean students by examining the impact of standard Korean and Gyeongsang regional dialect on the articulation of English vowels. Data were obtained through the Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC). Seven Korean words and ten English mono-syllabic words were uttered by adult, male speakers of standard Korean and Gyeongsang regional dialect, in particular, speakers with little to no experience living abroad were selected. Formant frequencies of the recorded corpus data were measured using spectrograms, provided by the speech analysis program, Praat. The recorded data were analyzed using the articulatory graph for formants. The results show that in comparison with speakers using standard Korean, those using the Gyeongsang regional dialect articulated both Korean and English vowels in the back. Moreover, the contrast between standard Korean and Gyeongsang regional dialect in the pronunciation of Korean vowels (/으/, /어/) affected how the corresponding English vowels (/ə/, /ʊ/) were articulated. Regardless of the use of regional dialect, a general feature of vowel pronunciation among Korean people is that they show more narrow articulatory movements, compared with that of native English speakers. Korean people generally experience difficulties with discriminating tense and lax vowels, whereas native English speakers have clear distinctions in vowel articulation.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.365-372
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• 2022

Compared to sensors mainly used in human activity recognition (HAR) systems, inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors are small and light, so can achieve lightweight system at low cost. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a binary neural network (BNN) based gait pattern analysis system using IMU sensor, and present the design and implementation results of an FPGA-based accelerator for computational acceleration. Six signals for gait are measured through IMU sensor, and a spectrogram is extracted using a short-time Fourier transform. In order to have a lightweight system with high accuracy, a BNN-based structure was used for gait pattern classification. It is designed as a hardware accelerator structure using FPGA for computation acceleration of binary neural network. The proposed gait pattern analysis system was implemented using 24,158 logics, 14,669 registers, and 13.687 KB of block memory, and it was confirmed that the operation was completed within 1.5 ms at the maximum operating frequency of 62.35 MHz and real-time operation was possible.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.26 no.11
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• pp.21-31
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• 2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changes healthcare around the globe, the need for smart healthcare that allows for remote diagnosis is increasing. The current classification of respiratory diseases cost high and requires a face-to-face visit with a skilled medical professional, thus the pandemic significantly hinders monitoring and early diagnosis. Therefore, the ability to accurately classify and diagnose respiratory sound using deep learning-based AI models is essential to modern medicine as a remote alternative to the current stethoscope. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based respiratory sound classification model using data collected from medical experts. The sound data were preprocessed with BandPassFilter, and the relevant respiratory audio features were extracted with Log-Mel Spectrogram and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC). Subsequently, a Parallel CNN network model was trained on these two inputs using stacking ensemble techniques combined with various machine learning classifiers to efficiently classify and detect abnormal respiratory sounds with high accuracy. The model proposed in this paper classified abnormal respiratory sounds with an accuracy of 96.9%, which is approximately 6.1% higher than the classification accuracy of baseline model.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.675-681
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• 2021

With the recent growth of the AI speaker market, the demand for speech synthesis technology that enables natural conversation with users is increasing. Therefore, there is a need for a multi-speaker speech synthesis system that can generate voices of various tones. In order to synthesize natural speech, it is required to train with a large-capacity. high-quality speech DB. However, it is very difficult in terms of recording time and cost to collect a high-quality, large-capacity speech database uttered by many speakers. Therefore, it is necessary to train the speech synthesis system using the speech DB of a very large number of speakers with a small amount of training data for each speaker, and a technique for naturally expressing the tone and rhyme of multiple speakers is required. In this paper, we propose a technology for constructing a speaker encoder by applying the deep learning-based x-vector technique used in speaker recognition technology, and synthesizing a new speaker's tone with a small amount of data through the speaker encoder. In the multi-speaker speech synthesis system, the module for synthesizing mel-spectrogram from input text is composed of Tacotron2, and the vocoder generating synthesized speech consists of WaveNet with mixture of logistic distributions applied. The x-vector extracted from the trained speaker embedding neural networks is added to Tacotron2 as an input to express the desired speaker's tone.

• Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.239-246
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• 2017

This paper compares the speech signal parameters between Korean and Chinese for Korean pronunciation /ㄹ/, which is caused many errors by Chinese leaners. Allophones of /ㄹ/ in Korean is divided into lateral group and tap group. It has been investigated the reasons for these errors by studying the similarity and the differences between Korean /ㄹ/ pronunciation and its corresponding Chinese pronunciation. In this paper, for the purpose of comparison the speech signal parameters such as energy, waveform in time domain, spectrogram in frequency domain, pitch based on ACF, Formant frequencies are used. From the phonological perspective the speech signal parameters such as signal energy, a waveform in the time domain, a spectrogram in the frequency domain, the pitch (F0) based on autocorrelation function (ACF), Formant frequencies (f1, f2, f3, and f4) are measured and compared. The data, which are composed of the group of Korean words by through a philological investigation, are used and simulated in this paper. According to the simulation results of the energy and spectrogram, there are meaningful differences between Korean native speakers and Chinese leaners for Korean /ㄹ/ pronunciation. The simulation results also show some differences even other parameters. It could be expected that Chinese learners are able to reduce the errors considerably by exploiting the parameters used in this paper.

• 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.