• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.7
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• pp.468-474
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• 2010

The major factor that disturbs practical use of speech recognition is distortion by the ambient and channel noises. Generally, the ambient noise drops the performance and restricts places to use. DSR (Distributed Speech Recognition) based speech recognition also has this problem. Various noise cancelling algorithms are applied to solve this problem, but loss of spectrum and remaining noise by incorrect noise estimation at low SNR environments cause drop of recognition rate. This paper proposes methods for speech enhancement. This method uses MMSE-STSA for noise cancelling and ideal binary mask to compensate damaged spectrum. According to experiments at noisy environment (SNR 15 dB ~ 0 dB), the proposed methods showed better spectral results and recognition performance.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.70-76
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• 2009

In speech communications in noisy environments, speech intelligibility is seriously degraded due to the masking effect of ambient noise. In this paper, a new method to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments is proposed. Based on the perception theory that the temporal envelope plays a major role in determining intelligibility, the proposed method uses a novel operation that enhances the fluctuation of band-wise temporal envelope and also contains pitch enhancement for improving speech naturalness. In addition, a new subjective evaluation scheme employing binaural listening is proposed in order to measure more reliable performance. The subjective performance measured with the proposed scheme shows that the proposed method improves both intelligibility and naturalness in various environments, whereas a function parameter can control the performance trade-off between intelligibility and naturalness.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.1665-1674
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• 2011

In this paper, we proposed an algorithm for speech enhancement of speeches corrupted by colored noise. When there is no correlation between colored noise and speech signal, the colored noise turns into white noise through whitening transformation. This transformed signal has been applied to the generalized subspace approach for speech enhancement. The speech spectral distortion, produced by the whitening transformation as pre-processing, has been restored by using the inverse whitening transformation as post-processing of the proposed algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm for speech enhancement has been confirmed by computer simulation. The colored noises used in this experiment were car noise and multi-talker babble. It is confirmed that the proposed algorithm shows better performance from SNR and SSD viewpoint over the previous approach with the data from the AURORA and TIMIT data base.

• 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.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.74-80
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• 2002

There are many researches on post-processing methods for the Korean continuous speech recognition enhancement using natural language processing techniques. It is very difficult to use a formal morphological analyzer for improving the speech recognition because the analysis technique of natural language processing is mainly for formal written languages. In this paper, we propose a speech recognition enhancement model using syntactic unit of morphemes. This approach uses the functional word level longest match which dose not consider spacing words. We describe the post-processing mechanism for the improving speech recognition by using proposed model which uses the relationship of phonological structure information between predicates md auxiliary predicates or bound nouns that are frequently occurred in Korean sentences.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.9-12
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• 2000

Voice dialing system can recognize the speaker's command and dial the destinate phone number automatically. Such a system is useful for wireless handsets and portable communication devices. As a personal voice dialing system, all the commands are used to train the HMM for speech recognition based on owner-selected phrases. Its implementation requires much less memory space and computation resource compared to a speaker-independent system. Since only two or three training utterances per command are used in this system, it is difficult to estimate exact state duration distribution to improve the recognition performance. Therefore a post-processor is presented to improve the performance. Experiments which use the database collected through the telephone line showed that the proposed post-processor improves the recognition system performance.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.76-81
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve the performance of a statistical model-based voice activity detection (VAD) which is based on the second-order conditional maximum a posteriori (CMAP). In our approach, the VAD decision rule is expressed as the geometric mean of likelihood ratios (LRs) based on adapted threshold according to the speech presence probability conditioned on both the current observation and the speech activity decisions in the pervious two frames. Experimental results show that the proposed approach yields better results compared to the statistical model-based and the CMAP-based VAD using the LR test.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.397-400
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• 2003

본 연구에서는 KM-Net(Hidden Markov Network)을 다양한 태스크에의 적용과 화자의 특성을 효과적으로 나타내기 위해 HM-Net 음성인식 시스템에 MLLR(Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression) 적응방법을 도입하였으며, HM-Net 학습 알고리즘을 개량하여 회귀클래스 생성방법을 제안한다. 제안방법은 PDT-SSS(Phonetic Decision Tree-based Successive State Splitting) 알고리즘의 문맥방향 상태분할에 의한 상태레벨 공유를 이용한 방법으로 새로운 화자로부터 문맥정보와 적응화 데이터의 발성 양에 의존하여 결정된 많은 적응 파라미터들을(평균, 분산) 자유롭게 제어할 수 있게 된다. 제안방법의 유효성을 확인하기 위해 국어공학센터(KLE) 452 음성 데이터와 항공편 예약관련 연속음성을 대상으로 인식실험을 수행한 결과, 전체적으로 음소인식의 경우 평균 34-37％, 단어인식의 경우 평균 9％, 연속음성인식의 경우 평균 7-8％의 인식성능 향상을 각각 보였다. 또한 적응화 데이터의 양에 따른 인식성능 비교에서, 제안방법을 적용한 인식 시스템이 적응 데이터의 양이 적은 경우에도 향상된 인식률을 보였으며. 잡음을 부가한 음성에 대한 적응화 실험에서도 향상된 인식성능을 보여 MLLR 적응방법의 특성을 만족하였다. 따라서 MLLR 적응방법을 도입한 HM-Net 음성인식 시스템에 제안한 회귀클래스 생성방법이 유효함을 확인한 수 있었다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.7
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• pp.119-124
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• 2015

Speech enhancement has been required as a preprocessor for a noise robust speech recognition system. Codebook-based Speech Enhancement (CBSE) is highly robust in nonstationary noise environments compared with conventional noise estimation algorithms. However, its performance is severely degraded for the codevector combinations that have lower correlation with the input signal since CBSE depends on the trained codebook information. To overcome this problem, only the reliable codevector combinations are selected to be used to remove the codevector combinations that have lower correlation with input signal. The proposed method produces the improved performance compared to the conventional CBSE in terms of Log-Spectral Distortion (LSD) and Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ).

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.08a
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• pp.309-314
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• 1998

언어학적 단위인 형태소의 특성을 유지하면서 음성인식 과정에 적합한 분리 기준의 새로운 디코딩 단위인 의사형태소를 정의하였다. 이러한 필요성을 확인하기 위해 새로이 정의된 37개의 품사 태그를 갖는 의사 형태소를 표제어 단위로 삼아 발음사전 생성과 형태소 해석에 초점을 두고 한국어 연속음성 인식 시스템을 구성하였다. 각 음성신호 구간에 해당되는 의사 형태소가 인식되면 언어모델을 사용하여 구성된 의사 형태소 단위의 상위 5개 문장을 기반으로 시작 시점과 끝 시점, 그리고 확률 값을 가진 의사 형태소 격자를 생성하고, 음성 사전으로부터 태그 정보를 격자에 추가하였다. Tree-trellis 탐색 알고리즘 기반에 의사 형태소 접속정보를 사용하여 음성언어 형태소 해석을 수행하였다. 본 논문에서 제안한 의사 형태소를 문장의디코딩 단위로 사용하였을 경우, 사전의 크기면에서 어절 기반의 사전 entry 수를 현저히 줄일 수 있었으며, 문장 인식률면에서 문자기반 형태소 단위보다 약 20% 이상의 인식률 향상을 얻을 수있었다. 뿐만 아니라 형태소 해석을 수행하기 위해 별도의 분석과정 없이 입력값으로 사용되며, 전반적으로 문자을 구성하는 디코딩 수를 안정화 시킬 수 있었다. 이 결과값은 상위레벨 언어처리를 위한 입력？으로 사용될 뿐만 아니라, 언어 정보를 이용한 후처리 과정을 거쳐 더 나은 인식률 향상을 꾀할 수 있다.