• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.4E
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• pp.148-153
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• 2006

A new normalized MBD algorithm is presented for nonstationary convolutive mixtures and its properties/modifications are discussed in details. The proposed algorithm normalizes the signal spectrum in the frequency domain to provide faster stable convergence and improved separation without whitening effect. Modifications such as nonholonomic constraints and off-diagonal learning to the proposed algorithm are also discussed. Simulation results using a real-world recording confirm superior performanceof the proposed algorithm and its usefulness in real world applications.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.1E
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• pp.17-24
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• 2008

Blind speech separation (BSS) is well-known as a powerful technique for speech enhancement in many real world environments. In this paper, we propose a new application of BSS - acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) in a car environment. For this purpose, we develop a block-online BSS algorithm which provides robust separation than a batch version in changing environments with moving speakers. Simulation results using real world recordings show that the block-online BSS algorithm is very robust to speaker movement. When combined with AEC, simulation results using real audio recording in a car confirm the expectation that BSS improves double talk detection and echo suppression.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.77-82
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• 2011

In this paper, we investigate source separation algorithms for stereo audio mixed using amplitude panning method. This source separation algorithms can be used in various applications such as up-mixing, speech enhancement, and high quality sound source separation. The methods in this paper estimate the panning angles of individual signals using the principal component analysis being applied in time-frequency tiles of the input signal and independently extract each signal through directional filtering. Performances of the methods were evaluated through computer simulations.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.503-514
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• 2021

Reverberation in speech signals tends to significantly degrade the performance of the Blind Source Separation (BSS) system. Especially in online systems, the performance degradation becomes severe. Methods based on joint diagonalizability constraints have been recently developed to tackle the problem. To improve the quality of separated speech, in this paper, we add the proposed de-reverberation method to the online BSS algorithm based on the constraints in reverberant environments. Through experiments on the WSJCAM0 corpus, the proposed method was compared with the existing online BSS algorithm. The performance evaluation by the Signal-to-Distortion Ratio and the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality demonstrated that SDR improved from 1.23 dB to 3.76 dB and PESQ improved from 1.15 to 2.12 on average.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.9-16
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• 2004

In this paper, we present a speech enhancement method as a pre-processor for voice commander under car environment. For the friendly and safe use of voice commander in a running car, non-stationary audio signals such as music and non-candidate speech should be reduced. Ow technique is a two microphone-based one. It consists of two parts Blind Source Separation (BSS) and Kalman filtering. Firstly, BSS is operated as a spatial filter to deal with non-stationary signals and then car noise is reduced by kalman filtering as a temporal filter. Algorithm Performance is tested for speech recognition. And the results show that our two microphone-based technique can be a good candidate to a voice commander.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.772-782
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• 2014

Two-microphone binary mask speech enhancement (2mBMSE) has been of particular interest in recent literature and has shown promising results. Current 2mBMSE systems rely on spatial cues of speech and noise sources. Although these cues are helpful for directional noise sources, they lose their efficiency in diffuse noise fields. We propose a new system that is effective in both directional and diffuse noise conditions. The system exploits two features. The first determines whether a given time-frequency (T-F) unit of the input spectrum is dominated by a diffuse or directional source. A diffuse signal is certainly a noise signal, but a directional signal could correspond to a noise or speech source. The second feature discriminates between T-F units dominated by speech or directional noise signals. Speech enhancement is performed using a binary mask, calculated based on the proposed features. In both directional and diffuse noise fields, the proposed system segregates speech T-F units with hit rates above 85%. It outperforms previous solutions in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and perceptual evaluation of speech quality improvement, especially in diffuse noise conditions.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.87-92
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• 2012

Speech enhancement aims to improve speech quality by removing background noise from noisy speech. Independent vector analysis is a type of frequency-domain independent component analysis method that is known to be free from the frequency bin permutation problem in the process of blind source separation from multi-channel inputs. This paper proposed a new method of microphone array based speech enhancement that combines independent vector analysis and beamforming techniques. Independent vector analysis is used to separate speech and noise components from multi-channel noisy speech, and delay-sum beamforming is used to determine the enhanced speech among the separated signals. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments for computer simulated multi-channel noisy speech with various signal-to-noise ratios were carried out, and both PESQ and output signal-to-noise ratio were obtained as objective speech quality measures. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method is superior to the conventional microphone array based noise removal approach like GSC beamforming in the speech enhancement.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.461-467
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• 2020

In noisy and multi-speaker environments, the performance of speech recognition is unavoidably lower than in a clean environment. To improve speech recognition, in this paper, the signal of the speaker of interest is extracted from the mixed speech signals with multiple speakers. The VoiceFilter model is used to effectively separate overlapped speech signals. In this work, clustering by Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) similarity score was employed to detect the speech signal of the interested speaker, which is used as the reference speaker to VoiceFilter-based separation. Therefore, by utilizing the speaker feature extracted from the detected speech by the proposed clustering method, this paper propose a speaker diarization system using only the mixed speech without an explicit reference speaker signal. We use phone-dataset consisting of two speakers to evaluate the performance of the speaker diarization system. Source to Distortion Ratio (SDR) of the operator (Rx) speech and customer speech (Tx) are 5.22 dB and -5.22 dB respectively before separation, and the results of the proposed separation system show 11.26 dB and 8.53 dB respectively.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.24-29
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• 2012

The sounds of exhaust emissions of automobiles are independent sound sources which are nothing to do with voices. We have no information for the sources of voices and exhaust sounds. Accordingly, Independent Component Analysis which is one of the Blind Source Separaton methods was used to segregate two source signals from each mixed signals. Maximum Likelyhood Estimation was applied to the signals came through the stereo microphone to segregate the two source signals toward the maximization of independence. Since there is no clue to find whether it is speech signal or not, the coefficients of the slope was calculated by the autocovariances of the signals in frequcency domain. Noise remover for speech signals was implemented by coupling the two algorithms.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.8
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• pp.418-426
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for the frequency channel segmentation using peaks and valleys in spectrogram. The frequency channel segments means that local groups of channels in frequency domain that could be arisen from the same sound source. The proposed algorithm is based on the smoothed spectrum of the input sound. Peaks and valleys in the smoothed spectrum are used to determine centers and boundaries of segments, respectively. To evaluate a suitableness of the proposed segmentation algorithm before that the grouping stage is applied, we compare the synthesized results using ideal mask with that of proposed algorithm. Simulations are performed with mixed speech signals with narrow band noises, wide band noises and other speech signals.