• MALSORI
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• no.53
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• pp.119-127
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• 2005

Speech recognition is one of the user interface technologies in commanding and controlling any terminal such as a TV, PC, cellular phone etc. in a ubiquitous environment. In controlling a terminal, the mismatch between training and testing causes rapid performance degradation. That is, the mismatch decreases not only the performance of the recognition system but also the reliability of that. Therefore, the performance degradation due to the mismatch caused by the change of the environment should be necessarily compensated. Whenever the environment changes, environment adaptation is performed using the user's speech and the background noise of the changed environment and the performance is increased by employing the models appropriately transformed to the changed environment. So far, the research on the environment compensation has been done actively. However, the compensation method for the effect of distant-talking speech has not been developed yet. Thus, in this paper we apply MLLR-based environment adaptation to compensate for the effect of distant-talking speech and the performance is improved.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.2E
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• pp.71-76
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• 2005

Compared to normal speech, distant-talking speech is characterized by the acoustic effect due to interfering sound and echoes as well as articulatory changes resulting from the speaker's effort to be more intelligible. In this paper, the acoustic features for distant-talking speech due to the articulatory changes will be analyzed and compared with those of the Lombard effect. In order to examine the effect of different distances and articulatory changes, speech recognition experiments were conducted for normal speech as well as distant-talking speech at different distances using HTK. The speech data used in this study consist of 4500 distant-talking utterances and 4500 normal utterances of 90 speakers (56 males and 34 females). Acoustic features selected for the analysis were duration, formants (F1 and F2), fundamental frequency, total energy and energy distribution. The results show that the acoustic-phonetic features for distant-talking speech correspond mostly to those of Lombard speech, in that the main resulting acoustic changes between normal and distant-talking speech are the increase in vowel duration, the shift in first and second formant, the increase in fundamental frequency, the increase in total energy and the shift in energy from low frequency band to middle or high bands.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.185-194
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• 2013

Abstract- In distant-talking environments, speech recognition performance degrades significantly due to noise and reverberation. Recent work of Michael L. Selzer shows that in microphone array speech recognition, the word error rate can be significantly reduced by adapting the beamformer weights to generate a sequence of features which maximizes the likelihood of the correct hypothesis. In this approach, called Likelihood Maximizing Beamforming algorithm (Limabeam), one of the method to implement this Limabeam is an UnSupervised Limabeam(USL) that can improve recognition performance in any situation of environment. From our investigation for this USL, we could see that because the performance of optimization depends strongly on the transcription output of the first recognition step, the output become unstable and this may lead lower performance. In order to improve recognition performance of USL, some post-filter techniques can be employed to obtain more correct transcription output of the first step. In this work, as a post-filtering technique for first recognition step of USL, we propose to add a Wiener-Filter combined with Feature Weighted Malahanobis Distance to improve recognition performance. We also suggest an alternative way to implement Limabeam algorithm for Hidden Markov Network (HM-Net) speech recognizer for efficient implementation. Speech recognition experiments performed in real distant-talking environment confirm the efficacy of Limabeam algorithm in HM-Net speech recognition system and also confirm the improved performance by the proposed method.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.39-40
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• 2007

For efficient interaction between human and robots, speech interface is a core problem especially in noisy and reverberant conditions. This paper analyzes main issues of spoken language interface for humanoid robots, such as sound source localization, voice activity detection, and speaker recognition.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.921-931
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• 2010

It has been shown that the principal subspace-based multichannel Wiener filter (MWF) provides better performance than the conventional MWF for suppressing interference in the case of a single target source. It can efficiently estimate the target speech component in the principal subspace which estimates the acoustic transfer function up to a scaling factor. However, as the input signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) becomes lower, larger errors are incurred in the estimation of the acoustic transfer function by the principal subspace method, degrading the performance in interference suppression. In order to alleviate this problem, a principal subspace modification method was proposed in previous work. The principal subspace modification reduces the estimation error of the acoustic transfer function vector at low SIRs. In this work, a frequency-band dependent interpolation technique is further employed for the principal subspace modification. The speech recognition test is also conducted using the Sphinx-4 system and demonstrates the practical usefulness of the proposed method as a front processing for the speech recognizer in a distant-talking and interferer-present environment.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.15-20
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• 2003

For some applications such as teleconference or telecommunication systems using a distant-talking hands-free microphone, the near-end speech signals to be transmitted is disturbed by an ambient noise and by an echo which is due to the coupling between the microphone and the loudspeaker. Furthermore, the environmental noise including channel distortion or additive noise is assumed to affect the original input speech. In the present paper, a new approach using echo canceller and maximum a posteriori(MAP) estimation is introduced to improve the accuracy of hands-free speech recognition. In this approach, it was shown that the proposed system was effective for hands-free speech recognition in ambient noise environment including echo. The experimental results also showed that the combination system between echo canceller and MAP environmental adaptation technique were well adapted to echo and noise environment.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.151-154
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• 2005

원거리 음성인식에서 인식률의 성능향상을 위해 필수적인 다채널 마이크 환경에서 방 안의 도처에 분산되어있는 원거리 마이크를 사용하여 TV, 조명 등의 주변 환경을 음성으로 제어하고자 한다. 이를 위해 각 채널의 인식결과를 통합하여 최적의 결과를 얻고자 채널의N-best 결과와 N-best 결과에 포함된 hypothesis의 frame-normalized likelihood 값을 사용하여 Bayesian network을 훈련하고 인식결과를 통합하여 최선의 결과를 decision 하는데 사용함으로써 원거리 음성인식의 성능을 향상시키고 또한 hands-free 응용을 현실화하기위한 방향을 제시한다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2014.10a
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• pp.150-155
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• 2014

본 논문에서는, 원거리 음성인식을 위한 서브밴드 필터링 기반의 빠르고 효율적인 에코제거 시스템을 제안한다. 제안하는 에코제거 시스템은 우선 채널간 유사도 (correlation) 가 높을 경우 적응필터가 오작동하는 것을 방지하기 위해 spatial decorrelation 을 적용하게 된다. 그리고 tree 형태를 가지는 IIR filterbank 기반의 subband 구조를 채택함으로써, 적은 차수로도 효과적인 analysis, synthesis 필터링을 수행할 수 있도록 한다. 이 과정에서 불가피하게 발생하는 서브 밴드간 spectral aliasing은 notch filter를 적용해 해결할 수 있다. 또한 적응 필터로는 improved proportionate normalized least-mean-square (IP-NLMS) 알고리즘을 사용해 수렴속도 및 에코제거 성능에서 우수함을 확인하였다. 마지막으로 decision-directed estimation 기반의 residual echo suppressor를 적용해 잔여 에코를 제거하게 된다. 본 논문에서는 각 단계를 구성하게 된 이론적인 배경을 소개하고, 실제 에코가 존재하는 환경에서 ERLE, 원거리 음성 인식률, computational complexity를 통해 제안하는 에코제거 시스템의 효과를 입증하도록 한다.