• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.21 no.4
• /
• pp.361-373
• /
• 2002

In this paper, we propose a channel normalization method to improve the performance of CMS (cepstral mean subtraction) which is widely adopted to normalize a channel variation for speech and speaker recognition. CMS which estimates the channel effects by averaging long-term cepstrum has a weak point that the estimated channel is biased by the formants of voiced speech which include a useful speech information. The proposed Formant-broadened Cepstral Mean Subtraction (FBCMS) is based on the facts that the formants can be found easily in log spectrum which is transformed from the cepstrum by fourier transform and the formants correspond to the dominant poles of all-pole model which is usually modeled vocal tract. The FBCMS evaluates only poles to be broadened from the log spectrum without polynomial factorization and makes a formant-broadened cepstrum by broadening the bandwidths of formant poles. We can estimate the channel cepstrum effectively by averaging formant-broadened cepstral coefficients. We performed the experiments to compare FBCMS with CMS, PFCMS using 4 simulated telephone channels. In the experiment of channel estimation, we evaluated the distance cepstrum of real channel from the cepstrum of estimated channel and found that we were able to get the mean cepstrum closer to the channel cepstrum due to an softening the bias of mean cepstrum to speech. In the experiment of text-independent speaker identification, we showed the result that the proposed method was superior than the conventional CMS and comparable to the pole-filtered CMS. Consequently, we showed the proposed method was efficiently able to normalize the channel variation based on the conventional CMS.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
• /
• v.25 no.8
• /
• pp.525-531
• /
• 2015

Driving sound is an effective element to promote the product identity of a vehicle by providing customers with attractive sound which reflects the concept of a vehicle. Recently, major automakers are focusing on the target sound setting so that the sound can represent the brand image as well as the unique concept of a vehicle. In this study, a new method of target setting for the driving sound will be introduced based on using formant filter and musical harmonics characteristics. In addition, a target sound suggested from this method will be realized and verified by using active noise control in vehicle.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.23 no.1
• /
• pp.61-74
• /
• 2004

In this paper, a contort- and speaker-dependent cepstrum extraction method and a channel normalization method for minimizing the loss of speaker characteristics in the cepstrum were proposed for a robust speaker recognition system over the channel. The proposed extraction method creates a cepstrum based on the pitch synchronous analysis using the inherent pitch of the speaker. Therefore, the cepstrum called the 〃pitch synchronous cepstrum〃 (PSC) represents the impulse response of the vocal tract more accurately in voiced speech. And the PSC can compensate for channel distortion because the pitch is more robust in a channel environment than the spectrum of speech. And the proposed channel normalization method, the 〃formant-broadened pitch synchronous CMS〃 (FBPSCMS), applies the Formant-Broadened CMS to the PSC and improves the accuracy of the intraframe processing. We compared the text-independent closed-set speaker identification on 56 females and 112 males using TIMIT and NTIMIT database, respectively. The results show that pitch synchronous km improves the error reduction rate by up to 7.7% in comparison with conventional short-time cepstrum and the error rates of the FBPSCMS are more stable and lower than those of pole-filtered CMS.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.333-342
• /
• 2012

This paper presents a vowel onset point (VOP) detection method based on the human auditory system. This method maps the "perceptual" frequency scale, i.e. Mel scale onto a linear acoustic frequency, and then establishes a series of Triangular Mel-weighted Filter Bank simulate the function of band pass filtering in human ear. This nonlinear critical-band filter bank helps greatly reduce the data dimensionality, and eliminate the effect of harmonic waves to make the formants more prominent in the nonlinear spaced Mel spectrum. The sum of mel spectrum peaks energy is extracted as feature for each frame, and the instinct at which the energy amplitude starts rising sharply is detected as VOP, by convolving with Gabor window. For the single-word database which contains 12 vowels articulated with different kinds of consonants, the experimental results showed a good average detection rate of 72.73%, higher than other vowel detection methods based on short-time energy and zero-crossing rate.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.43 no.4
• /
• pp.422-435
• /
• 2024

This study intended to verify the effects of face masks on the Korean language in terms of acoustic, aerodynamic, and formant parameters. We chose all types of face masks available in Korea based on filter performance and folding type. Two professional voice actors (a male and a female) with more than 20 years of experience who are native Koreans and speak standard Korean participated in this study as speakers of voice data. Face masks attenuated the high-frequency range, resulting in decreased Vowel Space Area (VSA) and Vowel Articulation Index (VAI)scores and an increased Low-to-High spectral ratio (L/H ratio) in all voice samples. This can result in lower speech intelligibility. However, the degree of increment and decrement was based on the voice characteristics. For female speakers, the Speech Level (SL) and Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) increased with increasing face mask thickness. In this study, the presence or filter performance of a face mask was found to affect speech acoustic parameters according to the speech characteristics. Face masks provoked vocal effort when the vocal intensity was not sufficiently strong, or the environment had less reverberance. Further research needs to be conducted on the vocal efforts induced by face masks to overcome acoustic modifications when wearing masks.