• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.668-673
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose the minima controlled speech presence uncertainty tracking method to improve a speech enhancement. In the conventional tracking speech presence uncertainty, we propose a method for estimating distinct values of the a priori speech absence probability for different frames and channels. This estimation is inherently based on a posteriori SNR and used in estimating the speech absence probability (SAP). In this paper, we propose a novel estimation of distinct values of the a priori speech absence probability, which is based on minima controlled speech presence uncertainty tracking method, for different frames and channels. Subsequently, estimation is applied to the calculation of speech absence probability for speech enhancement. Performance of the proposed enhancement algorithm is evaluated by ITU-T P. 862 perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) under various noise environments. We show that the proposed algorithm yields better results compared to the conventional tracking speech presence uncertainty.

• 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.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.490-496
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• 2020

We present a method to improve the performance of the multi-channel Wiener filter in noisy environment. To build subspace-based multi-channel Wiener filter, in the case of single target source, the target speech component can be effectively estimated in the principal subspace of speech correlation matrix. The speech correlation matrix can be estimated by subtracting noise correlation matrix from signal correlation matrix based on the assumption that the cross-correlation between speech and interfering noise is negligible compared with speech correlation. However, this assumption is not valid in the presence of strong interfering noise and significant error can be induced in the principal subspace accordingly. In this paper, we propose to adjust the principal subspace vector using speech presence probability and the steering vector for the desired speech source. The multi-channel speech presence probability is derived in the principal subspace and applied to adjust the principal subspace vector. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves the performance of multi-channel Wiener filter in noisy environment.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.9-15
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• 2018

This paper proposes an optimal gain modification method of the Multichannel Wiener filter (MWF) using speech presence probabilities. Conventional gain modification methods of MWFs have the problem of the increase of speech distortions while reducing residual noises with its relative heuristic approach. However, the proposed optimal gain modification method, derived by solving the unconstrained minimization problem of the probability-involved cost function, reduces amounts of residual noises and signal distortions simultaneously. Through an evaluation of the filtered waveforms and spectrograms, it is verified that the proposed method results in an improved SNR with less signal distortions compared to the conventional MWF.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.256-261
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve the performance of minima controlled recursive averaging (MCRA) which is based on the conditional maximum a posteriori criterion. A crucial component of a practical speech enhancement system is the estimation of the noise power spectrum. One state-of-the-art approach is the minima controlled recursive averaging (MCRA) technique. The noise estimate in the MCRA technique is obtained by averaging past spectral power values based on a smoothing parameter that is adjusted by the signal presence probability in frequency subbands. We improve the MCRA using the speech presence probability which is the a posteriori probability conditioned on both the current observation the speech presence or absence of the previous frame. With the performance criteria of the ITU-T P.862 perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and subjective evaluation of speech quality, we show that the proposed algorithm yields better results compared to the conventional MCRA-based scheme.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.649-655
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• 2022

In this paper, a determinant-based two-channel noise reduction method which utilizes speech presence probability (SPP) is proposed. The proposed method improves noise reduction performance from the conventional determinant-based two-channel noise reduction method in [7] by applying SPP to the Wiener filter gain. Consequently, the proposed method adaptively controls the amount of noise reduction depending on the SPP. For performance evaluation, the segmental signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the perceptual evaluation of speech quality, the short time objective intelligibility, and the log spectral distance were measured in the simulated noisy environments considered various types of noise, reverberation, SNR, and the direction and number of noise sources. The experimental results presented that determinant-based methods outperform phase difference-based methods in most cases. In particular, the proposed method achieved the best noise reduction performance maintaining minimum speech distortion.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.279-285
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• 2013

In this paper, we propose a novel speech enhancement method to improve the performance of the conventional global soft decision which is based on the spectral gradient method applied to the ratio of a priori speech absence and presence probability value (q). Conventional global soft decision scheme used a fixed value of q in accordance with the hypothesis assumed, but the proposed algorithm is a technique for improving the speech absence probability which is applied adaptively variable value of q according to the speech presence or absence in the previous two frames and the conditions of the spectral gradient value. Experimental results show that the proposed improved global soft decision method based on the spectral gradient method yields better results compared to the conventional global soft decision technique based on the performance criteria of the ITU-T P. 862 PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality).

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.254-258
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a robust speech recognition system under noisy environments. Since the presence of noise severely degrades the performance of speech recognition system, it is important to design the robust speech recognition method against noise. The proposed method adopts a new distance measure technique based on stochastic probability instead of conventional method using minimum error. For evaluating the performance of the proposed method, we compared it with conventional distance measure for the 10-isolated Korean digits with car noise. Here, the proposed method showed better recognition rate than conventional distance measure for the various car noisy environments.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.153-158
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• 2007

This paper presents a new approach to noise estimation to improve speech enhancement in non-stationary noisy environments. The proposed method combines the two separate noise power estimates provided by the minimum statistics (MS) for speech presence and soft decision (SD) for speech absence in accordance with SAP (Speech Absence Probability) on a separate frequency bin. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by the subjective test under various noise environments and yields better results compared with the conventional MS or SD-based schemes.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.77-85
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• 2010

This paper proposes an efficient feature vector processing technique to guard the Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) system against a variety of noises. In the proposed approach, emotional feature vectors are extracted from speech processed by comb filtering. Then, these extracts are used in a robust model construction based on feature vector classification. We modify conventional comb filtering by using speech presence probability to minimize drawbacks due to incorrect pitch estimation under background noise conditions. The modified comb filtering can correctly enhance the harmonics, which is an important factor used in SER. Feature vector classification technique categorizes feature vectors into either discriminative vectors or non-discriminative vectors based on a log-likelihood criterion. This method can successfully select the discriminative vectors while preserving correct emotional characteristics. Thus, robust emotion models can be constructed by only using such discriminative vectors. On SER experiment using an emotional speech corpus contaminated by various noises, our approach exhibited superior performance to the baseline system.