• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.92-97
• /
• 2004

Background and Objectives : The purpose of this study was to examine objectively pre and post operative voice quality evaluation and intelligibility of alaryngeal voice using speech recognition program, HUVOIS. Materials and Methods : 2 laryngologists and 1 speech pathologist were evaluated 'G', 'R', 'B' in the GRBAS sclae and speech intelligibility using NTID rating scale from standard paragraph. And also acoustic estimates such as jitter, shimmer, HNR were obtained from Lx Speech Studio. Results : Speech recognition rate was not significantly different between pre and post operation for pathological vocie samples though voice quality(G, B) and acoustic values(Jitter, HNR) were significantly improved after post operation. In Alaryngeal voices, reed type electrolarynx 'Moksori' was the highest both speech intelligibility and speech recognition rate, whereas esophageal speech was the lowest. Coefficient correlation of speech intelligibility and speech recognition rate was found in alaryngeal voices, but not in pathological voices. Conclusion : Current study was not proved speech recognition program, HUVOIS during telephone program was not objective and efficient method for assisting subjective GRBAS scale.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.52
• /
• pp.133-144
• /
• 2004

The quality of narrowband speech can be enhanced by the bandwidth extension technology. This paper proposes a mixed excitation and an energy compensation method based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). First, we employ the mixed excitation model having both periodic and aperiodic characteristics in frequency domain. We use a filter bank to extract the periodicity features from the filtered signals and model them based on GMM to estimate the mixed excitation. Second, we separate the acoustic space into the voiced and unvoiced parts of speech to compensate for the energy difference between narrowband speech and reconstructed highband, or lowband speech, more accurately. Objective and subjective evaluations show that the quality of wideband speech reconstructed by the proposed method is superior to that by the conventional bandwidth extension method.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
• /
• 2002.07a
• /
• pp.727-729
• /
• 2002

In this paper, we proposed quad variable rates ADPCM coding method and its implementation on C6000 DSP, which is modified from the standard ADPCM of ITU G.726 for speech quality improvement considering the environmental noise Four coding rates, 16Kbps, 24Kbps, 32Kbps and 40Kbps are used for speech window samples and the rate decision threshold is decided by the environmental noise level. The object of the proposed method is to reduce the coding rate while retaining the speech quality and the speech quality is considerably close to 40Kbps single rate coder with the coding rate close to 16Kbps single rate coder under the environmental noise. The environmental noise level affects the coding rate and the noise level is calculated per every speech window samples. At high noise level, more samples are coded at higher rates to enhance the quality, but at low noise level, only the big speech signals are coded at higher rates and more speech samples are coded at lower coding rates to reduce the coding rates. The influence of the noise on tile speech signal is considerably high for small signals and the small signal has the higher ZCR (zero crossing rate). The method is simulated in PC and to be implemented on C6000 floating point DSP board in real time operations.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• v.43 no.1
• /
• pp.82-94
• /
• 2021

In this work, six voiced/unvoiced speech classifiers based on the autocorrelation function (ACF), average magnitude difference function (AMDF), cepstrum, weighted ACF (WACF), zero crossing rate and energy of the signal (ZCR-E), and neural networks (NNs) have been simulated and implemented in real time using the TMS320C6713 DSP starter kit. These speech classifiers have been integrated into a linear-predictive-coding-based speech analysis-synthesis system and their performance has been compared in terms of the percentage of the voiced/unvoiced classification accuracy, speech quality, and computation time. The results of the percentage of the voiced/unvoiced classification accuracy and speech quality show that the NN-based speech classifier performs better than the ACF-, AMDF-, cepstrum-, WACF- and ZCR-E-based speech classifiers for both clean and noisy environments. The computation time results show that the AMDF-based speech classifier is computationally simple, and thus its computation time is less than that of other speech classifiers, while that of the NN-based speech classifier is greater compared with other classifiers.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.20 no.4E
• /
• pp.31-38
• /
• 2001

A large-scale synthesis database for a unit selection based synthesis method usually retains redundant synthesis unit instances, which are useless to the synthetic speech quality. In this paper, to eliminate those instances from the synthesis database, we proposed a new pruning method called weighted vector quantization (WVQ). The WVQ reflects relative importance of each synthesis unit instance when clustering the similar instances using vector quantization (VQ) technique. The proposed method was compared with two conventional pruning methods through the objective and subjective evaluations of the synthetic speech quality: one to simply limit maximum number of instance, and the other based on normal VQ-based clustering. The proposed method showed the best performance under 50% reduction rates. Over 50% of reduction rates, the synthetic speech quality is not seriously but perceptibly degraded. Using the proposed method, the synthesis database can be efficiently reduced without serious degradation of the synthetic speech quality.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
• /
• v.42 no.4 s.304
• /
• pp.103-110
• /
• 2005

Speech Database is one of the most important part of Text-to-speech(TTS) system Especially, the embedded TTS system needs more small size of database than that of the server TTS system So, the compression and statistical reduction or database is a very important factor in the embedded TTS system But this compression and statistical reduction of database always rise a loss of quality of the synthesised speech. In this paper, we propose a method of constructing database for high quality embedded TTS system and verify the quality of synthesised speech with MOS(Mean Opinion Score) test.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.464-470
• /
• 2016

This paper presents a speech recognition database verification system using speech measures, and describes a speech measure extraction algorithm which is applied to this system. In our previous study, to produce an effective speech quality measure for the system, we propose a combination of various speech measures which are highly correlated with WER (Word Error Rate). The new combination of various types of speech quality measures in this study is more effective to predict the speech recognition performance compared to each speech measure alone. In this paper, we increase the system independency by employing GMM acoustic score instead of HMM score which is obtained by a secondary speech recognition system. The combination with GMM score shows a slightly lower correlation with WER compared to the combination with HMM score, however it presents a higher relative improvement in correlation with WER, which is calculated compared to the correlation of each speech measure alone.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.32 no.3
• /
• pp.214-226
• /
• 2013

Assessing the quality of audio signals is an important consideration in making high quality sounds and various methods have been developed. This paper provides a general framework of sound quality and a technical overview of the international standard methods which are described in ITU-T, ITU-R, IEC and ANSI Recommendations in the speech intelligibility, speech quality, and audio quality areas. In addition, some recent findings and future works are included.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.37 no.6
• /
• pp.512-517
• /
• 2018

Improving voice quality is a major concern in telecommunications. In this paper, we propose a robust speech quality enhancement against background noise and packet loss at VoIP (Voice-over-IP) receiver. The proposed method combines network jitter estimation based on hybrid Markov chain, adaptive playout scheduling using the estimated jitter, and speech enhancement based on restoration of amplitude and phase to enhance the quality of the speech signal arriving at the VoIP receiver over IP network. The experimental results show that the proposed method removes the background noise added to the speech signal before encoding at the sender side and provides the enhanced speech quality in an unstable network environment.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.77-84
• /
• 2018

The purpose of this study is to examine the acoustic characteristics of Parkinsonian speech, with respect to different utterance conditions, by employing acoustic/auditory-perceptual analysis. The subjects of the study were 15 patients (M=7, F=8) with Parkinson's disease who were asked to read out sentences under different utterance conditions (clear/casual). The sentences read out by each subject were recorded, and the recorded speech was subjected to cepstrum and spectrum analysis using Analysis of Dysphonia in Speech and Voice (ADSV). Additionally, auditory-perceptual evaluation of the recorded speech was conducted with respect to breathiness and loudness. Results indicate that in the case of clear speech, there was a statistically significant increase in the cepstral peak prominence (CPP), and a decrease in the L/H ratio SD (ratio of low to high frequency spectral energy SD) and CPP F0 SD values. In the auditory-perceptual evaluation, a decrease in breathiness and an increase in loudness were noted. Furthermore, CPP was found to be highly correlated to breathiness and loudness. This provides objective evidence of the immediate usefulness of clear speech intervention in improving the voice quality of Parkinsonian speech.