• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.121-128
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• 2008

Accurate voice activity detection have a great impact on performance of speech applications including speech recognition, speech coding, and speech communication. In this paper, we propose methods for voice activity detection that can adapt to various car noise situations during driving. Existing voice activity detection used various method such as time energy, frequency energy, zero crossing rate, and spectral entropy that have a weak point of rapid. decline performance in noisy environments. In this paper, the approach is based on existing spectral entropy for VAD that we propose voice activity detection method using MFB(Met-frequency filter banks) spectral entropy, gradient FFT(Fast Fourier Transform) spectral entropy. and gradient MFB spectral entropy. FFT multiplied by Mel-scale is MFB and Mel-scale is non linear scale when human sound perception reflects characteristic of speech. Proposed MFB spectral entropy method clearly improve the ability to discriminate between speech and non-speech for various in noisy car environments that achieves 93.21% accuracy as a result of experiments. Compared to the spectral entropy method, the proposed voice activity detection gives an average improvement in the correct detection rate of more than 3.2%.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.141-148
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• 2010

In this paper, voice activity detection (VAD) for dual-channel noisy speech recognition is proposed in which spatial cues are employed. In the proposed method, a probability model for speech presence/absence is constructed using spatial cues obtained from dual-channel input signal, and a speech activity interval is detected through this probability model. In particular, spatial cues are composed of interaural time differences and interaural level differences of dual-channel speech signals, and the probability model for speech presence/absence is based on a Gaussian kernel density. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed VAD method, speech recognition is performed for speech segments that only include speech intervals detected by the proposed VAD method. The performance of the proposed method is compared with those of several methods such as an SNR-based method, a direction of arrival (DOA) based method, and a phase vector based method. It is shown from the speech recognition experiments that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods by providing relative word error rates reductions of 11.68%, 41.92%, and 10.15% compared with SNR-based, DOA-based, and phase vector based method, respectively.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.205-208
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• 2003

Voice activity detection is a important problem in the speech recognition and speech communication. This paper introduces new feature parameter which are reconstructed by spectral entropy of information theory for robust voice activity detection in the noise environment, then analyzes and compares it with energy method of voice activity detection and performance. In experiments, we confirmed that spectral entropy and its reconstructed parameter are superior than the energy method for robust voice activity detection in the various noise environment.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.169-174
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• 2010

This paper explains end-point detection method for better speech recognition rates. The proposed method determines speech and non-speech region with the entropy and the harmonic detection of speech. The end-point detection using entropy on the speech spectral energy has good performance at the high SNR(SNR 15dB) environments. At the low SNR environment(SNR 0dB), however, the threshold level of speech and noise varies, so the precise end-point detection is difficult. Therefore, this paper introduces the end-point detection methods which uses speech spectral entropy and harmonics. Experiment shows better performance than the conventional entropy methods.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.46-55
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• 2001

In this paper, a new voice activity detection method estimating SNR of enhanced speech with extended spectral subtraction (ESS) is proposed. Voice activity detection is performed by putting an second Wiener filter behind an Wiener filter used in the ESS to estimate speech and noise power of output signal of first Wiener filter. The proposed voice activity detection method does not require many computational loads and performs well under severe input SNR. Boll's spectral substraction algorithm with proposed voice activity detection was compared to ESS under several noise environment having different time-frequency distributions. During speech and non-speech activity, performance of Boll's spectral substraction algorithm with proposed voice activity detection is superior to that of ESS.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.11-16
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• 2013

This paper proposes robust feature extraction for accurate voice activity detection (VAD). VAD is one of the principal modules for speech signal processing such as speech codec, speech enhancement, and speech recognition. Noisy environments contain nonstationary noises causing the accuracy of the VAD to drastically decline because the fluctuation of features in the noise intervals results in increased false alarm rates. In this paper, in order to improve the VAD performance, harmonic-weighted energy is proposed. This feature extraction method focuses on voiced speech intervals and weighted harmonic-to-noise ratios to determine the amount of the harmonicity to frame energy. For performance evaluation, the receiver operating characteristic curves and equal error rate are measured.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.95-105
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• 2003

This paper describes a new parameter for voice activity detection which serves as a front-end part for automatic speech recognition systems. The new parameter called run-ratio is derived from the runs test statistic which is used in the statistical test for randomness of a given sequence. The run-ratio parameter has the property that the values of the parameter for the random sequence are about 1. To apply the run-ratio parameter into the voice activity detection method, it is assumed that the samples of an inputted audio signal should be converted to binary sequences of positive and negative values. Then, the silence region in the audio signal can be regarded as random sequences so that their values of the run-ratio would be about 1. The run-ratio for the voiced region has far lower values than 1 and for fricative sounds higher values than 1. Therefore, the parameter can discriminate speech signals from the background sounds by using the newly derived run-ratio parameter. The proposed voice activity detector outperformed the conventional energy-based detector in the sense of error mean and variance, small deviation from true speech boundaries, and low chance of missing real utterances

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.312-323
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• 2014

Voice activity detection is very important process that find voice activity from noisy speech signal for noise cancelling and speech enhancement. Over the past few years, many studies have been made on voice activity detection, it has poor performance for speech signal of sentence form in a low SNR environment. In this paper, it proposed new voice activity detection algorithm that has beginning VAD process using entropy and main VAD process using fuzzy membership shifted c-means clustering. We conduct an experiment in various SNR environment of white noise to evaluate performance of the proposed algorithm and confirmed good performance of the proposed algorithm.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.26-30
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• 2019

This paper proposes a new voice activity detection (VAD) method which is based on SNR and non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation. In the conventional SNR-based VAD methods, voice activity probability is obtained by estimating frame-wise SNR at each spectral component. However these methods lack performance in various noisy environments. We devise a hybrid VAD method that uses non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation as well as SNR estimation, where the speech intelligibility score is estimated based on deep neural network. In order to train model parameters of deep neural network, we use MFCC vector and the intrusive speech intelligibility score, STOI (Short-Time Objective Intelligent Measure), as input and output, respectively. We developed speech presence measure to classify each noisy frame as voice or non-voice by calculating the weighted average of the estimated STOI value and the conventional SNR-based VAD value at each frame. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than the conventional VAD method in various noisy environments, especially when the SNR is very low.

• MALSORI
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• no.48
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• pp.107-116
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• 2003

This paper deals with a new parameter for voice detection which is used for many areas of speech engineering such as speech synthesis, speech recognition and speech coding. CV (Coefficient of Variation) of speech spectrum as well as other feature parameters is used for the detection of speech. CV is calculated only in the specific range of speech spectrum. Average magnitude and spectral magnitude are also employed to improve the performance of detector. From the experimental results the proposed voice detector outperformed the conventional energy-based detector in the sense of error measurements.